The Thread Control Escape Rule

When trying to determine if your code's access of a certain resource is thread safe you can use the thread control escape rule:

If a resource is created, used and disposed within
the control of the same thread,
and never escapes the control of this thread,
the use of that resource is thread safe.

Resources can be any shared resource like an object, array, file, database connection, socket etc. In Java you do not always explicitly dispose objects, so "disposed" means losing or null'ing the reference to the object.

Taken from: http://tutorials.jenkov.com/java-concurrency/thread-safety.html