Jailbreak: Love on the Run Documentary Review
Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
“It’s like a disgusting romance novel”
An interviewee says this about the events involving her former colleague Vicky White, a corrections officer who helped a dangerous criminal escape from prison because she was having an affair with him.
The Netflix documentary Jailbreak: Love on the Run is 1 hour and 28 minutes long and first establishes Vicky White’s personality—a fifty-something corrections officer who was the boss-woman at the Lauderdale County Jail in Alabama. Former colleagues recall Vicky as a very hardworking woman who put in seventeen years of service at the place and basically ran the show. So when she ran away with Casey White (the same surname is a coincidence), who was serving a 75-year jail term for a string of crimes, everybody was shocked. However, a few inmates were already aware of something brewing between Casey and Vicky White.
The jailbreak took place in 2022, and the documentary features recorded audio calls between Casey and Vicky over a period of two years, many of which were sexual in nature. There’s also a lot of cam footage of Vicky and Casey from the Lauderdale facility. The quality is very grainy, and except for lending some authenticity to this over-stretched documentary, it doesn’t do much for the storytelling.
Jailbreak: Love on the Run should’ve simply been an episode in a true-crime documentary series, like Netflix’s Worst Ex Ever, with a crisper one-hour runtime or maybe even shorter. A lot of the documentary is simply about Vicky’s former colleagues repeating the same sentiments—’oh, she was so hardworking’/’she was very diligent’/’she ran the place.’ Apart from this, it also features a few ex-convicts who served time at the Lauderdale facility, giving their testimony and romanticizing the sordid affair.
Vicky is made out to be some sort of old, gullible, lonely victim who was manipulated by a shrewd career criminal—which is probably true to some extent. However, given that she was a corrections officer for seventeen long years, always surrounded by dangerous criminals, it’s ridiculous to paint her as the victim. It seemed that everybody knew she was slightly ‘soft’ on the inmates, and if that was really the case, maybe she shouldn’t have been in charge of the place at all.
The documentary unwittingly highlights a bigger problem than law enforcement being betrayed by one of their own—the overcrowding of prisons and the lack of enough force to keep things under control. Vicky was able to help Casey escape the prison with unprecedented ease; she said he had a court hearing and offered to take him to court alone. Nobody objected because they were understaffed, even though it was absurd to let a lone woman escort a much younger, hulking criminal—Casey White was 6 feet 9 inches tall. From their flirtatious calls to months-long planning of running away together, the documentary coherently charts how Vicky orchestrated the escape and triggered a nationwide search for her and her lover. It’s definitely the stuff for a pulpy crime-romance, all right.
It’s very clear that the story makes for a better movie script than a dry documentary. I could imagine Kate Winslet playing Vicky and actor Timothy Simons (recently seen in ‘Nobody Wants This’) portray Casey, largely owing to his height. There’s a 2022 movie titled Prisoner of Love inspired by the case, starring Nicholle Tom and Adam Mayfield, on Tubi TV. Regardless, for true-crime fans who do not know anything about the Casey White prison-break case, Jailbreak: Love on the Run is a decent one-time watch.
Rating: 5 on 10. You can watch the documentary on Netflix.
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