Prison Escapes Vex Swiss Canton By NEIL MACLUCAS

ZURICH—One Swiss canton can't seem to keep its prisoners behind bars.
The late July jailbreak of a notorious jewel thief was the most recent setback for the canton of Vaud, in western Switzerland near the border with France.

Swiss Police / Getty Images

Escaped jewel thief Milan Poparic

 In that case, assailants rammed a van into the main gate of the Bochuz penitentiary in Orbe and sprayed gunfire, allowing Milan Poparic, a convicted member of the so-called Pink Panthers gang of jewel thieves, and another man to scale a ladder over a wall and speed away in a getaway car, local police and prison authorities said. Neither has been caught.
In that case, assailants rammed a van into the main gate of the Bochuz penitentiary in Orbe and sprayed gunfire, allowing Milan Poparic, a convicted member of the so-called Pink Panthers gang of jewel thieves, and another man to scale a ladder over a wall and speed away in a getaway car, local police and prison authorities said. Neither has been caught.
Mr. Poparic, who had been serving a nearly seven-year term for a 2009 jewelry-store robbery in Neuchâtel, is one of 18 prisoners over the past year to have escaped from three Vaud prisons, officials say. None have been recaptured, said Vaud police, declining further comment.
In addition to three members of the Pink Panthers—named after the 1963 movie starring David Niven as a daring jewel thief—a handful of people awaiting trial have busted out of Vaud's prisons before proceedings began.
Sylvie Bula, who runs Vaud's prison services, declined to comment broadly on the overall reasons for the recent spate of escapes, but criminologists and legal experts have pointed to budgetary restrictions that have led to antiquated facilities that are overcrowded.
Ms. Bula didn't comment on those issues, but she did say the prison system would study the latest incident to see if changes should be made. However, she said such a professional attack would be difficult to prevent.
"When break-ins occur with such force and are so well-organized," Ms. Bula said, "it makes it very difficult for us to react."
Switzerland, which divides its prison system into three independently operated zones based on language and geography, has had just a handful of escapes in recent years in the German-speaking regions, said Robert Frauchiger, who is in charge of prisons in the German-speaking northwest and central Switzerland.
In German-speaking Zurich, the country's largest city, the latest escape occurred in 2011 when a youth slipped away from custody during a prison transfer, a spokeswoman for the city's prison authority said.
Vaud's prisons are old, outdated and overcrowded, observers say. The Bochuz penitentiary, which houses 250 inmates, was built in 1920 and hasn't been renovated since 1999, when its psychiatric unit was expanded. As in many prisons around the world, the running of Bochuz has been partially outsourced to a private firm, Protectas SA, which didn't return calls seeking comment.
A nearby prison in Vaud, La Croisée, has a similar history. Built in 1932 as a sanitarium for alcoholics, La Croisée was converted in 1983 into a jail for prisoners awaiting trial on a wide variety of charges, ranging from assault to petty theft.
As the prison population grew, the facility was expanded twice, once in 1994 and again a decade later. The prison has an official capacity of 196, but now houses 292 inmates.
Over the past year, 11 prisoners have slipped out of La Croisée. Police declined to comment on whether any have been recaptured, but the prison service says none of the 11 represented a "significant risk" to public safety.
Vaud's prison population has also outgrown the system's capacity. Vaud's jails, prisons and penitentiaries hold about 1½ times as many prisoners as they were designed to accommodate, says the canton's prison services. Vaud houses 103 inmates for every 100,000 residents.
In total, Switzerland's 109 prisons hold 6,559 inmates, a ratio of 83 prisoners to every 100,000 residents, according to the Federal Statistics Office. "Overfilling of prisons leads to tensions and problems between both inmates and other inmates and between prison staff and inmates" that could hurt prison security, said Dieter Dölling, a professor at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Heidelberg.
Other parts of French-speaking Switzerland have also had prison problems, though none as pronounced as those in Vaud.
In April, prison guards and inmates both protested overcrowding at the Champ-Dollon penitentiary in Geneva. The prison holds about 820 prisoners, despite an official capacity of 376.
Some of the breakouts have been surprisingly simple.
In May, five inmates were sprung from the jail in Lausanne, the capital of Vaud, when three masked accomplices approached the outside prison wall and threw a bag containing a weapon, pepper spray and wire cutters into a courtyard where about 30 prisoners were exercising, police said. Inmates opened the bag, threatened the guards and other prisoners with the weapon and used the pepper spray to keep them at bay. They then cut through a perimeter fence and scaled the outside wall using a ladder provided by the outside accomplices. Guards stopped one inmate, but five others escaped.
"The whole operation was extremely well-organized," the Vaud police said at the time, "and lasted less than five minutes."
—Marta Falconi contributed to this article. Write to Neil MacLucas at neil.maclucas@dowjones.com

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