The head of the Miami-Dade boot camp where two inmates walked away from a work detail said the escape was unusual for the program.
"This was an unusual day, extraordinary in this program, unfortunately, but I’m glad they were apprehended," Commander Rose Green said, a day after James Dukes and Manuel Guzman escaped while picking up trash.
The program is a place where judges can send offenders from as young as 14 to as old as 24 to serve the last six months of their sentence, as long as they haven't been charged with a capitol offense, like murder.
Green said they're not necessarily nonviolent offenders.
"I wouldn't say nonviolent because some of them have domestic violence or issues like that which we also give counseling for," she said.
Dukes was serving time for burglary and grand theft and Guzman for carjacking and robbery. Dukes and Guzman, who are both 20, were sent to the camp a few months ago.
According to Green, they were being supervised not by an officer but by a trained civilian when they ran off. The incident caused two nearby schools to be locked down for hours.
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"It's unfortunate that the schools were on lockdown, I don't know as far as what we could've done because we took all of the steps that we needed to take, the individuals fitted our criteria," Green said.
The inmates were considered low-risk inmates who didn't cause problems in the classrooms or sleeping quarters of the jail facility and that's why they were on work detail.
Both men were scheduled to be released in just three months but now could face more time behind bars.
