Prisoners Say They Were Beaten, Choked In Aftermath of Killers' Escape
In the days after convicted murderers Richard Matt and David Sweat escaped Clinton Correction Facility, corrections officers allegedly beat, choked, and threatened to waterboard the inmates remaining in their block, prisoners told the New York Times. The abuse was ostensibly part of an effort to find the escapees, but the Times reports it seemed more like “a campaign of retribution.”
The abuse reportedly centered on inmates from Matt and Sweat’s unit, the honor block, who were transferred to other prisons or put in solitary confinement after the escape. They’d made it to the honor block based on good behavior, and there’s thus far no evidence linking any of them to the escape.
Still, the man in the next cell over from Matt and Sweat, Patrick Alexander, says he was handcuffed, taken to a broom closet with a bag over his head, and slammed repeatedly against the wall while guards screamed “How much are they paying you to keep your mouth shut?”
He wasn’t the only one, according to the Times.
More than 60 inmates have filed complaints about being beaten or otherwise physically abused by corrections officers, but the state corrections department says there’s no “credible evidence substantiating the inappropriate use of force during the transfer of inmates from Clinton Correctional Facility.”
Alexander and other inmates say they were denied medical care after their brutal interrogations, and told not to tell medical staff how they got their injuries, and were allegedly made to sign documents covering for their abusers:
Paul Davila, another resident of the honor block, wrote in his complaint that after he was beaten during an interrogation, he was pressured to “sign a report stating, ‘I was not assaulted.’”
“Left with no other choice,” he wrote, “I signed.”
Now they’ve lost the honor block privileges and prison jobs they’d earned through years of good behavior, even though they say those freedoms had nothing to do with Sweat and Matt’s escape—the night shift guards’ laziness did.
And now, the Times speculates, the guards are taking that failure out on inmates in a frantic attempt to “exonerate themselves for the security lapses that contributed to the breakout.”
