Joyce Mitchell & Her Inmates With Benefits

By Michael Benson

The Spring 2015 escape by two worst-of-the-worst prisoners from the Clinton Correctional Facility (CCF) in Dannemora, N.Y., resulted in the largest manhunt in New York State history and the biggest domestic news story of the year. For three weeks America held its collective breath, as the narrative unfolded to its inevitable, violent conclusion. But even after it did, even after the players were no longer in motion, the tale retained its journalistic legs, largely because of its many angles:

—the brutal and depraved crimes that Richard Matt and David Sweat committed to be caged in a maximum security prison to begin with,

—the complacency and arrogance within the prison that allowed the escapees to gather key intelligence,

—the complementary skills of the prisoners, how they became a two-headed escape monster accomplishing an extraordinary feat,

—tales of the frightened public, who went without sleep, and when they did nod off it was with a shotgun ’cross their laps,

—tales of the 1,200 manhunters, the stalwart members of law enforcement, who scoured the harshest of wilderness for weeks on end in relentlessly inclement weather, praying they would catch the men before innocents were hurt,

—the budget cuts by the State of New York that impacted the case, and

—Joyce “Tillie” Mitchell, the sad sack of a woman who allowed herself to be used by the escapees, giving them the tools they would need to cut their way out of the beast’s belly, in exchange for flirtation, fantasy, and a modicum of tawdry prison sex.

Guess which facet of the story became the focus of Lifetime’s TV movie?  No surprise. It was Tillie, star of the show, with her Walter Mitty fantasy life and muttonhead excuses. The mother of three was called “Shawskank” on the front page of the New York Post. Her anemic attempts to explain her unexplainable behavior were meant to be damage control, but brought only the wrath of the public.

            So here comes the TV movie, New York Prison Break: The Seduction of Joyce Mitchell, written and directed by Stephen Tolkin, which debuted on April 23 in the crucial Sunday prime-time slot. 

The movie gets a lot of things right. We briefly see Matt and Sweat’s brutality, and we feel the relaxed relationship between CCF’s prisoners and corrections officers that blurs their adversarial roles. The tunneling out and escape itself are presented in detail and with surprising accuracy.

It’s made clear that Mitchell’s carnal misadventures with Matt and Sweat were perfectly in character. Life for her was a daytime serial, from her young and restless schooldays to “As the Cell Block Turns” in adulthood. Her husband Lyle (Daniel Roebeck), a painfully dull but affable chatterbox, was the lover-on-the-side that broke up Joyce’s first marriage.

The manhunt and the effect of the escape on the Adirondack area are all but missing in the movie, leaving lots of room for clothes-on sex scenes featuring a lonely and bored fifty-something woman getting hot and bothered over sweet-talking dirtbags. The backroom intimacy portrayed is more than cringe-worthy. It’s crawl-out-of-your-skin worthy. But that’s prison sex in a nutshell, I’m guessing. 

Nobody asked me, but I gave New York Prison Break two and a half stars. It’s corny and melodramatic, but has a so-bad-it’s-good appeal—and I liked the movie better than I thought I would. Myk Watford as Matt and Joe Anderson as Sweat capture the superficial charm of these sociopaths, and Penelope Ann Miller gives Tillie an animation that may lack realism but improves watchability.

But I know one fellow certain to give New York Prison Break: The Seduction of Joyce Mitchell a rave review, two urgent thumbs up: New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo. He has to be ecstatic that the Lifetime movie never once touches upon one key factor that made the escape possible. Because of Albany’s penny-wise pound-foolish budget cuts, the superintendents of New York State prisons were not allowed to lockdown their facilities without an okay from an Albany beancounter. Days before the Clinton escape, a gang fight erupted on the prison grounds and the CCF superintendent wanted to declare a lockdown—but Albany said no. Too expensive. The lockdown would have resulted in a thorough search of every cell in the facility, exposing the fact that Sweat and Matt were singing the Credence song: DOO DOO DOO Lookin’ Out My Backdoor about their own self-made rear exits, back doors that would, within the week, lead them to an impressive but temporary freedom.

Michael Benson is the author of ESCAPE FROM DANNEMORA: Richard Matt, David Sweat, and the Great Adirondack Manhunt (ForeEdge), as well as Why the Grateful Dead Matter (ForeEdge) and The Devil at Genesee Junction (Rowman & Littlefield).

Richard Matt and David Sweat: Two-Headed Escape Monster

By Michael Benson

It was the perfect story: the Great Escape. On June 6, 2015, Richard Matt, a torture killer, and David Sweat, a cop killer, worst-of-the-worst prisoners in the Clinton Correctional Facility—the maximum security prison in Dannemora N.Y.—climbed, crawled, and slithered through a twenty-minute claustrophobic labyrinth of corridors and tunnels until they emerged into freedom through a manhole a block and a half outside the forbidding CCF wall. Now they were killers on the loose. Dangerous understated the matter. They were deadly and desperate.  And that was just the beginning. The story that unfolded had adventure, psychology, sex, depravity and brutality. It was the biggest story of 2015.

As you probably have heard, the pair were helped in their escape by a woman named Joyce Mitchell, a married civilian employee of the prison enjoying an inappropriate relationship with both prisoners, and a corrections officer, who owed the prisoners a few favors and inadvertently helped them escape.

The escapees were expecting Mitchell to show up with a getaway car but she was a no-show so they ducked into the woods, where they led up to 1,200 law enforcement officers on a three-week manhunt, the most expensive in New York State history. The hunt didn’t end well for either of the escapees, but you probably knew that as well.

Here’s something you might not know: It is doubtful that any two other prisoners could have pulled this off. It is unlikely that any other pair could have come up with a workable plan to get out of CCF, much less execute that plan.

When it was decided that, sure, what the heck, Matt and Sweat could live in adjacent cells in CCF’s ill-conceived “Honor Block”, the powers that be at the institution forgot a rule learned the hard way by Adolf Hitler during World War II.

Hitler’s bright idea, like many of his ideas, served not just to alleviate a problem but to prove a point, that point usually involving Aryan superiority. He decided to gather together all allied officers who were prisoners of war and had been caught planning or attempting escape, and put them in one “inescapable prison”, the formidable fortress known as Colditz.

Colditz was a castle prison atop a cliff overlooking the Rive Mulde and the town of Colditz, near Leipzig, Germany. What Hitler did accomplish by putting the escape-savvy officers all in one place, was create a think tank, an escape super-team, and before the war was over sixteen officers did successfully make it out.

One successful effort was led by Lieutenant Commander William Stephens. With socks covering their shoes, Stephens and three others crawled through windows, slithered over roofs, scaled down a wall using knotted sheets and fled to Switzerland disguised as French workmen, getting past checkpoints with forged documents including a leave pass with swastika stamp in the name of an actual French electrician employed by the Germans, and a service pass with photo and stamps.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Stephens’ escape plan was the involvement of the prison band, which would deviate from the score they played to signal the escapees regarding the sentries location. One musical variation meant the sentries were both at the center of the grounds, another signaled they were at opposite ends of the courtyard.

It was the ability of those allied officers to put their heads together that enabled Stephens and others to find freedom. In a smaller sense, that was what happened when Matt and Sweat were allowed to live in adjacent cells. As it turned out, the pair had complimentary skills and were able to pull off a feat that may have been beyond each of them working alone.

Richard Matt was a ladies man and a schmoozer. He could get women to do his bidding with his sex appeal and simultaneously get chummy with other men using his good-ol’-boy, one-of-the-fellas manner.

David Sweat was a three-dimensional thinker, a solver of puzzles, a planner who could read a blueprint upside-down from across the rooms. It would be his job to figure out how to get out. Matt would recruit any help they might need to pull off their plan.

Together they created a two-headed escape machine.

Couple this with the time-honored culture of arrogance and complacency among the corrections officers and civilian employees at CCF, none of whom complied with the rules for the simple reason that they believed escape to be impossible, and a practically impossible escape was suddenly not just possible, but real.

During the wee hours of that Spring morning, Matt and Sweat were able to exit their cells through back doors they had cut for themselves, descend a ladder to the sub-sub basement, chisel through a wall, enter a heating pipe and crawl through it under the prison’s main wall, exit the pipe, and ascend stairs to their manhole exit. It was an astounding accomplishment, one that could have been thwarted in a myriad of ways, but more certainly if CCF had taken a lesson from Hitler’s mistake, and kept the two bright boys as far apart as possible.

Michael Benson is the author of Escape From Dannemora: Richard Matt, David Sweat, and the Great Adirondack Manhunt (ForeEdge, 2017), and Why the Grateful Dead Matter (ForeEdge, 2016).