History's Greatest Escapes with Morgan Freeman Season 2, Episode 5: Escaping Devil's Island

Fleeing Parchman

A lone wolf prisoner, with aspirations of writing crime novels, ends up the star of his own break out story when he figures out how to escape from one of Mississippi's oldest and most notorious prison farms, Parchman Penitentiary.

43 min

Vietnam POW Escape

A German American pilot, Dieter Dengler, uses survival skills honed as a child to escape a secret prison in Laos during the early years of the Vietnam war.

San Quentin Breakout

A lifelong escape artist, Forrest Tucker, ends up in San Quentin prison; despite his advanced age, he manages to engineer an audacious prison break.

The Sobibor Revolt

Interviews and re-creations bring some of history's most daring jailbreaks to life, detailing every step of the way, including the inmates' meticulous plans and the manhunts that followed.

Alton City Escape

Quawntay Adams, a young African American man from Los Angeles gets caught up in a large-scale marijuana bust and is sentenced to a long prison term; when he finds out he is going to be a father, he determines to break out of his cell.

Tunneling to Freedom

During the Civil War, a daring prison break frees hundreds of captured Union soldiers; Colonel Thomas Rose was a schoolteacher before the Civil War; when he was captured and sent to Libby Prison in Richmond Virginia, he engineers a mass escape.

Breakout in Plain Sight

An Iranian-American psychopath goes to the men's city jail in Orange County Jail in Southern California; before he gets sent to a higher security prison, he escapes by crawling up the plumbing chase and rappelling down the side of the prison.