NYS Inspector General looks back at Dannemora prison breakout, 10 years later
June 6th marks 10 years since the Dannemora prison breakout at Clinton Correctional Facility, an event which triggered a weeks-long manhunt, national news coverage and prison reform.
The New York State Inspector General Office was led by Catherine Leahy-Scott at the time, issuing a 150-page report which found Richard Matt and David Sweat, the men who escaped, to be "master manipulators", with staff members Joyce Mitchell as a complicit, willful accomplice in the matter.
Lucy Lang is the current Inspector General, saying she's still impressed at the way authorities responded after the fact.
"What I think is most remarkable, looking back after 10 years on this catastrophic and potentially extremely dangerous event in New York state history is first how much New Yorkers really rallied around the efforts to locate the folks who had escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility," she said. "There were 1000s of law enforcement on the ground in and around Plattsburgh, Monroe County, and we had State Troopers sleeping in gymnasiums. And it was the people, the people of these local communities, who were providing food and water. Father's Day came and folks volunteered to cut all the Troopers' hair. People were working around the clock to try to locate these two very dangerous men, and the public really rallied in support of government to help make that happen. Then the other piece that is so moving to me as Inspector General is that this office did the best of what oversight should do in instances like this. It did a holistic, unbiased, comprehensive investigation into how this disaster had come to pass, and then it reported on it to the public."
That 150-page report detailed the circumstances leading up to the breakout, then offering ways for the corrections system to correct the issues which led the breakout.
"The systemic issues that we identified were addressed immediately, such as insisting on staff searches, requiring that people who are that incarcerated, people who are moving from one section of the prison to another, especially a section where they may have access to tools, but they do go through a magnetometer to make sure they have not secreted any tools on their body on their way back to their facility," Lang says. "There has been a great deal more scrutiny on things like cell checks and routine cell searches. So all of those things have dramatically improved across the system. And what we think about now is really, how can we take those lessons of the critical nature of security in facilities, and at the same time make sure that everyone who is incarcerated in New York State is treated with the respect and dignity that they deserve and is granted the programming and opportunities that they deserve for when they ultimately return back to their community, because unlike the two escapees in this case, who were never to come home, most members of the incarcerated population will be coming home to our communities, and we want to equip them to be productive members of our communities."
Lang will be conducting a panel on Wednesday, June 11th, with former New York State Police Superintendent Joseph D’Amico, Former New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision Commissioner Anthony Annucci, and Newsday New York State Correspondent Keshia Clukey, with opening remarks by Former Inspector General Catherine Leahy-Scott.
Watch the full conversation here:
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