Cobb County, a wealthy area northwest of Atlanta, recently advertised a new escape room on its Facebook page. “You’ve been wrongfully sentenced to life without parole,” the description read. “You’ve settled in, made a few friends, but every one has their breaking point.” It continued, “While the prison is in chaos because of a riot in the yard, you have a tiny window of opportunity to explore the building and carry out a great escape.” Noting a “hard difficulty level” and the potential use of fog machines, the description concluded with a line cribbed from “The Shawshank Redemption”: “It’s time to get busy living, or get busy dying.”
A local reporter posted a screenshot on Twitter. Commenters noted the weirdly worded plot. What, one asked, did “you’ve settled in” mean, exactly? Another responded, “I assume it means: ‘You have accepted that the system is irretrievably broken and nothing short of burning it all down will solve it. But the cafeteria shift gives you a chance to play with some new recipe ideas.’ ” Others offered context. “Robert Clark was wrongfully convicted in Cobb County” and served twenty-four years, a former inmate wrote. “Such injustices aren’t a game.” It is estimated that thousands of inmates in the U.S. are innocent. Conditions within Georgia’s prisons are currently under federal investigation.
One recent evening, five curious customers together paid a hundred and thirty-five dollars to try their luck. Among them were two Cobb County residents in their sixties who had lived the game’s basic premise: Calvin C. Johnson, Jr. (sixteen years for rape and aggravated sodomy; exonerated 1999), and Clarence Harrison (seventeen years for rape, robbery, and kidnapping; exonerated 2004). They arrived together in Johnson’s car. Johnson’s girlfriend was out of town, and Harrison was tired of sitting home alone. Neither had been to an escape room before.
“It’s like a game of Clue or something?” Johnson asked. He had a white goatee and wore an Atlanta Falcons hat. Someone explained the idea.
“Interesting,” Johnson replied. He went on, “I thought about escape. It’s normal. But then you think, Innocent people don’t break out of prison.”
“Because that’s criminal,” Harrison added. He wore khaki cargo shorts and used a cane. He said, “The warden thought I was trying to escape, because I was drawing stuff from memory—reconstructing the area where the crime occurred. But my idea of getting out was to prove my innocence with DNA.”
Christina Cribbs, a lawyer for the Georgia Innocence Project—which has freed a dozen people, including Harrison—joined them. Her office had discussed the prison-escape-room concept. “Tone-deaf at best,” she said. Shortly before the opening of the room, Cobb County quietly took down the Facebook post. “They know they did something wrong,” Cribbs said. “But there was no acknowledgment of it.”
“The old D.A. never said he was sorry to me, either,” Harrison said.
Inside, liability waivers were signed. A staffer handcuffed some of the group. Then he led them into “Shankshaw Penitentiary.” The first room had an interrogation table. There was a tape player on it with a cryptic recording. But advancing to the next room—a cell with a set of bunk beds, some books, a deck of cards, and what appeared to be a poster of the pinup girl Bettie Page—required a hint from a short man in a gas mask playing a prison guard. “Look inside of everything,” the man advised.
After a while, Johnson found a key hidden in the cell’s toilet. The guard claimed that the toilet had been donated by an actual Georgia jail.
“I thought so,” Johnson said. He asked someone else to reach in for the key.
Next was the warden’s office. A bunch of license plates on a wall, rearranged in the right order, opened the door to the final room—a maintenance closet. But a siren went off before the group could figure out the last clue. Game over.
“You almost had it,” the guard said. “I guess you’ll have to stay in here forever!” They headed for the exit.
Outside, the air felt nice. Some kids were playing Frisbee golf nearby. A vehicle resembling an unmarked patrol car sat in the parking lot. Was it real or a prop?
“Maybe the game’s not over yet,” Johnson said. He took out his phone and read something he’d written about wrongful convictions. “Nothing can replace what’s been taken from you. Not money, not counselors, not friends or family,” he said. “Still, you go forward marching into the future with hope.”
“A struggle for all of us,” Harrison said quietly, leaning on his cane.
Johnson’s phone rang. It was his girlfriend, asking how the experience had gone. “There’s no way to explain it other than it wasn’t realistic,” he said. As he spoke, a smiling white family headed inside. It was their turn to escape. ♦
