Sign up for email newsletters

Sign up for email newsletters

Ellis MacDougall tinkered with prison fences throughout his long career as a corrections boss.

He tried barbed wire, razor wire, U-bars, double fences, motion sensors, guard towers and walls. But desperate inmates always found new ways to climb over.

MacDougall, 67, Connecticut’s first prison commissioner, finally got it right in 1984. While teaching in South Carolina, he patented an innovative fence that uses a basic principle – gravity.

The arched fence gradually curves back over a climber’s head. As the climber ascends, gravity pulls his legs out from under him, limiting him to the use of only his fingers. If the climber is strong enough to continue, he loses his fingerhold, unable to grip a mini-mesh curtain at the top.

MacDougall’s fence, called First DeFence, is cropping up throughout the country and in Connecticut. It is slated for a new “supermax” prison in Somers and already is used at a Suffield prison named after MacDougall.

“We have always allowed man to use the strongest part of his body to climb – his legs,” MacDougall said. “I thought I would limit him to his fingers. This takes the strength of your lower limbs off the fence.”

MacDougall, now a prison consultant living in South Carolina, paused to talk about his fence during a recent stop in Connecticut.

“I call it the forehead fence,” he said. “Colleagues hit their forehead and say `That’s so simple, why didn’t I think of it?’ “

MacDougall’s fence looks like it belongs around a baseball batting cage, not a prison, and that is part of its appeal.

Without razor wire, the fence is ideal for minimum-security prisons and youth detention centers. It is planned for the low-security Maloney Correctional Institution in Cheshire. In California, it has been turned around to keep intruders out of a utility site and a private residential development.

“It doesn’t have the image of the German concentration camp,” MacDougall said. “That’s not the message we ought to be sending at the majority of correctional institutions.”

But First DeFence – crowned with razor wire – is suitable for tougher prisons. In Connecticut it is used at the high-security MacDougall and Walker prisons in Suffield.

With First DeFence’s unique design, just one roll of razor wire accomplishes what several rolls might on traditional fences, MacDougall said. The roll can be mounted on a “rocker arm” that causes the coils to collapse into the face of the climber.

First DeFence promotional videos show French Commandos and U.S. Army special forces wrestling with rocking coils, dangling from ropes and grappling hooks with no foothold. It took them five minutes, even with all their equipment, to get over the fence.

By contrast it takes only about a minute to get over a traditional razor-wire topped fence, a U.S. Army study found. Escapees often throw blankets or clothing over the coils while using their lower limbs to climb. With barbed wire, it takes only seven seconds to get up and over, the study found.

First DeFence’s unique design is attracting customers throughout the country. It currently surrounds about 90 prisons and mental health institutions in the United States and Canada.

Prison consultant George M. Camp said he recommends the fence to states designing new prisons. He said the fence – about 30 percent more expensive than traditional fencing – is still cost-effective because it reduces the need for guard towers and perimeter patrols.

“It is very, very tough to escape, if not impossible, without some kind of mechanical device to scale it,” said Camp, a director of the Criminal Justice Institute in South Salem, N.Y. “It really does prevent escapes. You cannot climb it.”

First DeFence has yielded a handful of escapes since its first installation in Florida in the late 1980s – but MacDougall says none occurred when the fence was installed properly.

In South Carolina, two youths cleared the fence at a juvenile facility. They got a running start and grabbed onto a fence pole that was left exposed at the top. It should have been covered by the mini-mesh curtain, he said.

Like traditional fences, First DeFence can be equipped with motion detectors to deter anyone who is trying to cut through the chain links. It also can be equipped with heavier- gauge mesh instead of chain links to resist cutting.

MacDougall’s inspiration for First DeFence was the old Somers prison fence, which was covered in the late 1960s by an upside- down U-bar.

MacDougall tried unsuccessfully to buy such a fence while heading Georgia prisons in the early 1970s. Several years later, heading Arizona prisons, he tried to recreate the Somers loop, bending a traditional fence. Inmates still got out, but MacDougall persisted.

Teaching criminal justice at the University of South Carolina in the 1980s, the idea came to him: bend the fence further inward.

He and his wife, Rachel, took out their life savings, about $20,000. They hired a patent attorney, enlisted an engineer and got the patent in 1987.

MacDougall and a fence manufacturer formed First DeFence International, borrowing about $450,000 to launch their venture. In 1991 the company was sold to First DeFence II Inc. of Columbia, S.C., which reported revenues this year of $1.5 million to $2 million, said company president Thomas Hagerty.

MacDougall, who gets royalties, stays involved in fence marketing efforts. He will travel to Kentucky this week to help pitch it to a foundation that runs a frequently vandalized cemetery.

“There’s a lot of pride in that fence,” MacDougall said.

Sign up for email newsletters