December 6, 2024

Jailbreak: Love on the Run is a prisoner of convention

the true crime that's worth your time

The crime
In late April of 2022, Alabama corrections officer Vicky White facilitated the escape of her incarcerated lover, Casey White, shocking her friends and family and touching off a ten-day manhunt that did not end well (do they ever?).

SDB’s full review here (or in your inbox with a paid subscription!)

The story (which may contain spoilers; jump to the rec box to avoid those!)
Jailbreak: Love on the Run dropped on Netflix in late September, and if memory serves, the doc feature hung around in the streamer's daily Top 10 for a while. I kept thinking, "Dang, still? Guess I should give it a look," but then didn't, probably because I couldn't bring myself to pay attention to yet another ".......sure?" three-parter that should have been a 90-minute feature. 

Now that I've finally watched it, I've got good news and bad news. Good news is, it is a 90-minute feature! Actually, it's only 88 minutes, and as much as anyone (read: "I, Sarah D. Bunting") might love a good process-y prison-break documentary with a sprinkling* of Love After Lockup, an hour and a half is enough. (Not least because Tubi and Lifetime handily beat Netflix to market with scripted takes on the case.)

*more than a sprinkling, really – in one of the myriad jailhouse phone calls the production uses as "primary sourcing," Vicky makes explicit reference to LAL 

Tyler Purser, a former cellie of Casey's who's interviewed in Jailbreak. (Netflix)

The bad news is that Jailbreak still employs the same tiresome tropes that a multi-part series would – a sizzle reel for itself at the beginning; timeline jumps designed to generate suspense, which create confusion instead – and ends up undercutting its own strengths. It's a compelling story to start with, it has mysteries at its heart that remain unanswered (did Casey have genuine feelings for Vicky or just manipulate her, for one), and it features unusual testimony. You don't usually hear from formerly incarcerated people in docs like this, and you don't usually hear about the incarceration itself, specifically the pressure points known to those inside that system. 

Jailbreak at its best gives insight into life as it's lived "in community" in a county lock-up, the almost collegial aspect of the day-to-day. Unfortunately, Jailbreak isn't interested in that part of its story, because (more bad news, y'all) Jailbreak is directed by Dan Abrams, and whatever else I might say about him, certainly I don't look to Mr. Live PD Is A Public Service for unconventional modes of inquiry into criminal-justice stories. Jailbreak thinks its story is twofold: that a career criminal with substance issues either wooed or duped a lonely lady nearly 20 years his senior into helping him lam it; and that law enforcement prevailed.

And yeah, that's the story, in the sense that The Old Man and the Sea is about fishing, but what about the part of the story where one of the lamsters is six foot nine and covered in prison tats, and has exactly zero reasonable chance of disappearing except into very dense woods? What about the disconnect between Vicky's co-workers never suspecting a thing, and Casey's "co-workers" being all "we got high on the reg, and while it wasn't cinchy to duck the cameras and have sex, it wasn't impossible either"? 

Casey towers over Vicky in security-camera footage. How exactly do you hide THAT guy in plain sight? (Netflix)

Why not spend a little more time carefully laying out the timeline of Vicky's house sale, acquisition of camping equipment and guns, and plan to put in her papers – not to mention when various recorded calls took place, and when these two realized they could speak freely (and have phone sex)? …I think the answer to at least one of these questions is that it's embarrassing to local law enforcement how long Vicky and Casey had taken to set up the escape, and that, while it didn't end well, it didn't end for a while, either. 

But it's also that, as noted, Abrams isn't interested in versions of crime stories that might seem to admire criminals' process, or to consider narratives about/by the incarcerated as per se worthwhile. To Abrams, Jailbreak is about a cop betraying her badge and paying the ultimate price. To me, it's about everything else in the story that sneaks in around the edges – but if you remember the story and you know the outcome, Abrams's predictable take isn't worth your time. - SDB