Polymarket Allows Gambling on New Orleans Jailbreak

• 10 inmates escaped a New Orleans jail on May 16
• Polymarket users are betting on which will be recaptured
• Similar bets appeared during wildfires, COVID, and wars

Prediction site Polymarket is taking bets on how long a group of inmates who broke out of the New Orleans Parish Prison can remain on the run. The market has horrified many observers, with one social media user pointing out the situation had “Squid Game vibes.”

It’s now been a week since 10 inmates – some of whom were convicted of violent crimes, including murder – went on the lam from the central New Orleans jail.

The inmates are believed to have escaped around midnight on May 16 after yanking open a sliding door from their jail cell. They ripped a toilet out of the wall and broke out through the resulting hole. They then climbed down a wall and ran across a highway before disappearing into the New Orleans community.

Taunting graffiti left by the inmates included the words “To [sic] Easy LoL”, with an arrow pointing to the hole in the wall, and a smiley face with its tongue out.

Five inmates, including Derrick Groves — a convicted killer of four people — are still on the loose.

Currently, Polymarket users can speculate on markets including “Which inmates will be captured by Friday?” and “How many inmates will be recaptured by Friday.”

At the time of this writing on early Friday, users believed Groves was the least likely to be apprehended, perhaps because he is the most notorious of the group.

User-Generated Markets

Polymarket is a decentralized platform that aims to “crowdsource the truth” via financial incentives. As such, markets are user-created. Anyone with a crypto wallet and sufficient funds can create one, and Polymarket doesn’t vet markets before they go live.

This is part of Polymarket’s appeal, but it also occasionally generates topics that are ethically controversial, and which would be inappropriate for the traditional regulated gambling industry, such as disasters or deaths.

Polymarket has also allowed bets on events such as the containment of Los Angeles wildfires and the progression of conflicts like the Israel-Hamas war. Again, critics say the site enables its users to profit from human suffering and catastrophic events.