Locate prisons in remote areas where escape is almost impossible and where prisoners can be kept busy at hard labor.
Keep them breaking rocks, cutting fire roads and draining swamps instead of hanging around in prison gyms.
Texas Dept Correction put a series of prisons in East Texas in the Trinity River bottoms. Great soil for growing croos, but if someone escaped, they would get lost in the bottoms, and when found beg to go back to the prison.