Scarfaced Clinton Baldwin made a life-size figure to dupe guards in a breakout like the one staged in prison flick Escape From Alcatraz.
He crafted a papier mâché head, stuck it on a mop, used pillows for the body and covered it with his duvet.
The 38-year-old then slipped through a sliding window, ran across a field and vaulted a fence at HMP Hatfield in Doncaster, South Yorks.
Officers thought the 6ft 4in inmate – jailed in 2006 for robbery – was asleep in bed.
They only realised he had gone the next morning.
The manner of Baldwin’s escape is a major embarrassment for the jail, which is already in the spotlight after a number of other prisoners absconded.
In the hit film starring Clint Eastwood – based on a real breakout at the maximum security US island jail in 1960 – three convicts fool warders with papier mâché mannequins before fleeing through a tunnel in a wall.
A source at HMP Hatfield told the Daily Star Sunday: “The escape is the talk of the prison.
“You’d have to be pretty stupid to fall for it but that’s exactly what the screws did.
"He used a window which everyone uses to bring in drugs that are dropped off on a lane outside the prison.
“I don’t think the guards even know the window is in use but it slides out and people can get in and out of it.
“Then he just ran and kept running.
"I think it was his plan all along because in the past few weeks all he has done at exercise time is run on the field.
“It really does show up the prison and the governor.” More than ten inmates have fled the Category D jail in recent months.
Seven have been rearrested but John Byrne, 34, who was locked up for drug and firearms offences, remains at large following his escape in August.
Byrne vanished after he was granted day release despite returning from his previous home leave “rotten drunk”.
Governor Chris Dyer granted him leave after he passed a drugs test.
But insiders claim that Byrne had used a vial full of clean urine to get the all-clear.
Our source said: “They should have known not to let a known junkie out.”
The jail was recently downgraded in the official prison ratings system.
