MoreyUnit

On Monday, 10 days after the escape, authorities captured murderer Tracy Province in Wyoming. They'd caught Daniel Renwick, convicted of second-degree murder, on Aug. 1 in Colorado.

But John McCluskey and his alleged accomplice, Casslyn Welch, are still on the lam, desperate and dangerous.

The fugitives have already left a trail of terror and possibly blood. They hijacked a truck. All but Renwick are suspects in the deaths of an Oklahoma couple whose burned bodies were found in New Mexico.

The case calls for a thorough, nonpartisan review without preconceptions. That would be a challenge under the best of circumstances. It's doubly hard in the middle of a particularly heated election season.

But with Arizona's growing inmate population and new private facilities in the works, we must have answers.

The prison population jumped 32 percent from fiscal 2001 to 2009, to nearly 40,000. The state sought bids this year on a contract to house 5,000 more.

The trio didn't need an elaborate Hollywood-style plan to break out of a medium-security prison in Golden Valley, near Kingman. No helicopter. No high-tech explosives. No elaborate disguises.

Here's what authorities believe happened on July 30. The three inmates walked out of their dormitory-style housing. Welch parked in the desert nearby, walked up to the prison and got close enough to throw tools inside. The inmates cut through two fences and crawled out.

The number of apparent lapses is troubling, from a housing door without a functioning alarm to the officers' predictable movements to the inmates' ability to get to the perimeter fence undetected. The Golden Valley prison, run by Utah-based Management and Training Corp., is classified as medium security and has 117 inmates serving life sentences, nearly half for first-degree murder.

Chuck Ryan, director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, said neither the design of the facility nor the state's inmate-classification system is to blame for the prison break. "Human error is the contributor to this escape," he said.

Running a prison is a complex mix of order and foresight. Many of the inmates have a potent combination of criminal skills, time on their hands and motivation to get around prison rules, with escape as the ultimate goal.

The escapes add to the debate over the role and oversight of private prisons in Arizona.

A related issue is whether Arizona should restrict the number of out-of-state and federal felons imprisoned in private facilities. In 2008, the head count topped 9,000 - more than double the number of Arizona prisoners under private oversight at the time.

There have been calls in the past for more regulation of the private-prison industry in Arizona.

After two convicted killers escaped from a private prison in Florence in 2007, then-Sen. Robert Blendu, a Litchfield Park Republican, introduced a bill that would have required private prisons to share information with state officials and barred them from bringing dangerous felons to Arizona.

The positions on the bill, which didn't pass, show the complexity of the overall issue.

Blendu was a private-prisoner supporter, but he worried that the legal framework hadn't kept up. Across the aisle, one of the Democratic legislators at the time, Rep. Pete Rios of Hayden, had gone from opposing private prisons to defending them as a source of jobs in his economically stressed district.

Whether through the action of the governor or the Legislature, a respected panel of leaders and experts must convene for a thorough analysis of how such dangerous convicts could get away so easily.