Worse than the inmates escaping after the guards left would be if someone came along and let them out. It takes weeks to die from starvation. So if the guards walked away with everyone locked in their cells then someone else could come along and unlock the doors and they have themselves a ready made army. You see that a lot in the Middle Eastern unrest. Prisons are a target for insurgents because a lot of their buddies are locked up there and if they can take the prison a large percentage of the inmates will join them.

Also worth noting that prisoners have friends and family as well. Not at all outside of the realm of possibilities people might show up looking to free their loved ones.

All part of the current en vogue thinking that attributes criminal behavior to substance issues and that if you treat the substance abuse you'll end the criminal behavior.
I don't believe it for a second.
The substance abuse is a side issue, not what drives the criminal behavior.
We're talking about people with no morals who prey on others and alter their perceptions through the use of any number of substances along the way

I respectfully disagree. Citing a few escapes as proof of how they would behave is less than nominal. I have intimate knowledge of this subject and many years of experience. I cannot talk about it in a public thread until I retire next January. Lets just say that (depending on the prison and type of people incarcerated there) that mass release of violent felons in an area far from their homes would be a terrible event for the locals.

In a normal escape, if there is such a thing, the idea is to slip away unnoticed. Many times there is at least a basic plan. In a catastrophic even there is no plan, there is no person on the outside. It would be straight up pilaging time. They might get around to the rape, but immediate pilaging would be there only means of sustenance. As an escaped prisoner your priority would be to secure a weapon, then use it to get food, water, drugs or whatever else you have been thinking about on the inside.

There will be no calling the cops, 911 won't work, no one is responding. In prison if you want something you take it if the person that owns it is weaker than you. I am very glad that the facility I work in is more than 30 miles from where I live and that it is the closest one. Getting home in an emergency would suck, but living in the woods has many benifits if you are home when the emergency occurs.

The big pothole in that theory is staffing.
Correctional settings only run well as long as staffing is consistent and predictable.
The staff will stop showing up long before society is completely broke down.
You can't even plan on simply locking down a facility and operating with skeletal staffing now that the bulk of inmate housing is in pods and not cellblocks
Even if the Sheriff forces his staff in at some minimal staff levels, the rest of local gov't is in the process of breaking down. if payroll staff don't show up, no one in any level of the local gov't s getting paid.
If people stop getting paid, you're looking at a single pay period going by before the bulk of employees bail, unless there are clear signs that the banks accounts will still be available and the paychecks are still getting honored.

Might the national guard get sent in?



I see the states and feds working with things as it all slides downwards.



You pick on pay but I think there will be a lot of problems with everything.



I don't feel like typing what I put in my first post, the locals know what they know.  



I would think seriously about the towns that know prisons cause they and their family work the prisons.



Not all prisons are just out in the middle of no where with nothing else around.

I can just see that working out great.  There is actually quite a lot that goes into being a CO, just handing a bunch of 18-23 year olds whose MOS is air defense, truck driving, or combat engineering, the keys and letting them figure it out on their own is going to end badly.

The state might mobilize them for state prisons.
I don't see there being enough Guardsmen for every correctional facility.
It isn't just prisons and county jails. There are multiple juvenile detention facilities in my county and across the state.
Luckily the worst of them of them are housed out in the boonies in one of our most rural townships and I don't see the residents there taking kindly to a bunch of downstate criminals breaking out of their secure detention facility.
A decade ago some drunk good old boy  residents in that town were in the news for chasing some black guy out of a party and through the woods on ATVs in the middle of the night screaming about how they were going to lynch him.