Correction officers didn’t discover they were gone until after 5 a.m. Officer Ronald Blair described the moment he spotted the two darkened cells, shook the beds, and then pulled off the sheets to see the dummies instead of the prisoners. The report said simply doing a nightly bed count would have foiled the escape plot.
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It also found that the system of unnannounced cell searches was so flawed that one conducted on Matt’s cell in March 2015 failed to find a hole in the wall more than a foot and a half big. · Officers failed to properly conduct at least 15 required weekly inspections of “cell integrity” to include examination of “bars, floors, vents, walls, and rear of cell from the catwalks”. Palmer pled guilty to promoting prison contraband and was sentenced to six months in county jail, and ordered to pay a $5,000 fine, in February. “If only one of the counts was done properly, the escape plan would have been instantly stopped”. Mitchell was responsible for smuggling in the hacksaws the two inmates used to cut holes in the backs of their cells. They eventually crawled out through a steam pipe.
Indeed, the escape was compared to The Shawshank Redemption, the 1994 classic in which an inmate escaped through prison pipes. She talked about leaving with them and killing her husband, also a prison instructor, it said. Sweat pleaded guilty to escape charges and was ordered to pay restitution for some of the $573,000 in fix costs.
According to the report, Scott’s investigation found there were longstanding lapses in security at the facility. These included the failure by officers assigned to the front gate to search employees’ bags entering the prison; night counts of inmates that were conducted negligently or not at all; inadequate cell searches; and poor supervision of inmates and employees by security staff and civilian managers in the tailor shop, among others.
Sweat and Matt also manipulated prison workers into helping them, often trading artwork for supplies that could be used to cut their way out of their cells, the report said. Mitchell herself was not adequately supervised, leading to her “grossly inappropriate relationships” with the inmates, the report said.
“Even as she professed her love for Sweat in notes she secretly sent him, Mitchell engaged in numerous sexual encounters with Matt in the tailor shop”, the report said.
The report is as frankly detailed about the sexcapades between Matt and Joyce “Tillie” Mitchell, the guard who was convicted of providing material assistance to the escapees, as it is about any other facet of the prison break.
Department of corrections employees have also been identified as committing criminal acts, the report said.
Taxpayers shelled out more than $20 million as New York State Police and Corrections Officers marched across New York State searching for the unsafe convicts. “Many of these employees have resigned or have been terminated”.
The department says it’s reviewing the inspector general’s investigative report released Monday into security failures and will implement reforms throughout the prison system.
There was no immediate comment from the IG’s office on when its report would be completed.
“Lessons can be learned from this systemwide failure that shined a bright light on the need for a sustained investment in training, technology, and tools to keep up with the record high levels of violence in our prisons”, the statement said. “We look forward to working with the Governor and state officials to better address the safety and security of these facilities, and of the inmates and Correction Officers who live and work there”.
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If basic protocols were followed, the escape could have been thwarted, avoiding the hunt that cost NY state approximately $23 million in law enforcement overtime, the report said. Twenty days after the breakout, Matt was shot and killed by U.S. Border Patrol agents about 40 miles from the prison in the town of Malone after he refused to drop a shotgun stolen from a seasonal camp; Sweat was captured two days later after he was shot and wounded by a NY state trooper in the town of Constable, less than two miles from the Canadian border.
