GITMO IN NY: PRISONERS BRUTALLY BEATEN
Night
had fallen at the Clinton Correctional Facility in far northern New
York when the prison guards came for Patrick Alexander. They handcuffed
him and took him into a broom closet for questioning. Then, Mr.
Alexander said in an interview last week, the beatings began.
As
the three guards, who wore no name badges, punched him and slammed his
head against the wall, he said they shouted questions: “Where are they
going? What did you hear? How much are they paying you to keep your
mouth shut?”
One of the guards put a plastic bag over his head, Mr. Alexander said, and threatened to waterboard him.
Hours
earlier, Richard W. Matt and David Sweat had made their daring escape
from the unit — called the “honor block” — where they were housed. Now
it appeared that Mr. Alexander, a fellow convicted murderer who lived in
an adjoining cell, was being made to suffer the consequences.
They
were also subjected to harsh policies ordered by the State Department
of Corrections and Community Supervision: Dozens of inmates, many of
whom had won the right to live on the honor block after years of good
behavior, were transferred out of Clinton to other prisons. Many were
placed in solitary confinement, and stripped of privileges they had
accrued over the years — even though no prisoners have yet been linked
to Mr. Matt’s and Mr. Sweat’s actions.
Indeed, it is prison employees who have been implicated: One has pleaded guilty to aiding the escape; another faces criminal charges; nine officers have been suspended; and the prison’s leadership has been removed.
More
than 60 inmates have filed complaints with Prisoners’ Legal Services,
an organization that assists indigent prisoners. And 10 members of an
inmate council at Clinton signed a letter last month to state
corrections officials making similar allegations.
“We
have been daily getting complaints along these lines from around the
state,” said Michael Cassidy, a lawyer for Prisoners’ Legal Services.
The
corrections department is apparently looking into the complaints.
Several inmates interviewed by The Times said they had been visited by
members of the department’s Office of Special Investigations. The Times
sent questions to the department on Monday morning seeking comment, but
has not received a response.
The
accounts suggest that as corrections officers frantically pressed for
information that could lead to the capture of the two prisoners, and
perhaps exonerate themselves for the security lapses that contributed to
the breakout, they resorted to brutal tactics that most likely violated
department regulations.
Victor
Aponte, who worked in the prison tailor shop where Mr. Matt also had a
job, said a guard with an American flag tattoo, known at the prison as
“Captain America,” tied a plastic bag around Mr. Aponte’s neck in an
interrogation and tightened it until he passed out. Reggie Edwards, who
supervised the tailor shop, said corrections officials put him in
solitary confinement for three weeks and threw out most of his
belongings, including his family photographs and his wedding ring.
After a three-week manhunt, a federal agent shot and killed Mr. Matt on June 26. Two days later, a State Police officer shot Mr. Sweat, and he was captured.
Mr.
Alexander got the news at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Ulster
County, where he had been transferred. He said he earned his place on
the Clinton honor block because he had not been written up for any
serious infractions since entering the prison system in 2004. He
occupied the cell next to Mr. Matt, who was in prison for murdering his
boss and then cutting up the body. (Long before he cut his way out of
prison, Mr. Matt was known around Clinton by the nickname Hacksaw.)
For Mr. Alexander, his cell’s location apparently made him a target for investigators.
The
night of the escape, Mr. Alexander said, he worked late at the tailor
shop, and when he returned to his cell around 9:45 p.m., Mr. Matt gave
him bowls of salad and fried chicken that had been purchased at the
commissary. “He told me: ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll get the bowls from
you in the morning,’” Mr. Alexander recalled.
He
said he was awakened around 5:15 a.m. for the morning count. “The
officer comes banging on the bars,” he said. “He goes to Matt’s cell and
bangs on the bars, and then he leaves and he bangs on Dave’s bars.”
When there was no response, he said, a sergeant and several guards
frantically rushed up and down the cellblock shouting to one another
that two inmates were gone.
“The sergeant comes over to me: ‘You hear something? You had to hear something,’” Mr. Alexander recalled.
It
would be several hours before the first details of the escape were made
public. Around 11 a.m., Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo toured the honor block and
inspected the holes the inmates had cut in the backs of their cells
with hacksaw blades.
The governor then stopped to question Mr. Alexander.
“Must
have kept you awake with all that cutting, huh?” Mr. Cuomo asked,
according to video of the exchange. Then, Mr. Alexander said, the
governor “gave me his best tough guy stare and walked off.”
Later, the governor said he would be “shocked” if any corrections officers had been involved.
Twice
during the day of the escape, Mr. Alexander said he was questioned by
investigators from the State Police and the corrections department
inspector general’s office.
Then,
around 8 p.m., he was handcuffed and taken to a broom closet where, he
said, three corrections officers whom he had never seen before
interrogated him. An officer wearing a jacket with the initials C.I.U. —
Crisis Intervention Unit — sat down and asked him, “Do you know the
difference between this interview and those other interviews?” Mr.
Alexander recalled.
This time, the officer warned, there were only uniformed guards in the room, Mr. Alexander said.
“The
officer jumps up and grabs me by my throat, lifts me out of the chair,
slams my head into the pipe along the wall,” he said. “Then he starts
punching me in the face. The other two get up and start hitting me also
in the ribs and stomach.”
With each punch, Mr. Alexander said, the officers shouted another question.
“The whole time he’s holding me up by my throat,” he added.
When
Mr. Alexander repeatedly insisted that he had no information, one
officer pointed to a plastic bag hanging on some pipes, asked if he knew
what it was for and said, “You know what waterboarding is?” Mr.
Alexander recalled.
The officer then put the bag over his head and started beating him again, Mr. Alexander said.
He said the interrogation lasted about 20 minutes, and he was then taken, bleeding, back to his cell.
Later,
Mr. Alexander said, the same officer “began quietly taunting and
threatening me, telling me, ‘Don’t worry, Fat Boy, we’ll be seeing you
really soon.’”
In
a letter to Prisoners’ Legal Services, Mr. Aponte, who also worked in
the tailor shop, described going through a similar interrogation two
days later.
One
officer stood in front of a window blocking the view into the room, he
wrote, while another guard in a C.I.U. windbreaker tied a garbage bag
around his neck, “using the plastic bag as a hanging noose.”
“I don’t know how long he hung me up like that because I passed out,” Mr. Aponte wrote.
Mr.
Aponte, along with several other inmates, said they were initially
denied medical care. Days later, when he was finally taken to the prison
clinic, officers warned him not to tell the medical staff how he got
his injuries, he wrote in a letter.
“The
sergeant tells me that I’ve been in prison for long time and I should
know better, that if I didn’t tell the nurse that was going to examine
me that nothing has happened that they were going to kill me for real
this time,” he wrote.
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.”
In
the two weeks after the escape, inmates from Clinton’s honor block were
dispersed, many of them sent to solitary confinement at other prisons.
Some said they were beaten during their transfers by officers from the
department’s Correctional Emergency Response Team, known as CERT.
“The
CERT team rushed into my cell, threw me down on the bed, twisted my
wrist and yelled at me not to resist,” an inmate, Manuel Nunez, wrote in
a letter, adding that later they “assaulted me while I was cuffed,
chained and shackled.”
He said when he and other inmates were lined up to board a corrections bus, officers passed by, punching them.
During
an interview last week at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining,
N.Y., Mr. Nunez showed reporters purple scars around his right ankle
that he said were the result of CERT officers’ intentionally shackling
him too tightly.
Some
of the former honor block residents have lost privileges that had taken
years to earn at Clinton. Mr. Edwards, who had supervised 50 inmates at
the prison tailor shop, had been able to earn as much as $45 a week.
Since being moved to Sing Sing, he has been working as a porter making
$3 a week. “They took everything from me,” he said. “They did everything
they could to blame the ones who stayed.”
Mr.
Alexander said that days after being beaten up, he was moved, first to
the Upstate Correctional Facility and then to Shawangunk Correctional
Facility. In the process, he said he lost his TV, his diaries, family
photos and a decade’s worth of letters from his mother and aunt that he
had laminated with packing tape for safekeeping.
Despite
all this, Mr. Alexander and many others interviewed said they did not
resent the two escapees. Mr. Sweat was serving life in prison with no
possibility of parole for shooting a sheriff’s deputy in the back 20
times and then running him over. Faced with that kind of time, some
said, they may well have considered escape.
“I
can’t say what I’d do; I didn’t have the time Sweat has,” said Mr.
Alexander, who has spent 11 years in prison and will be eligible for
parole in 2023. “So no, I don’t resent them. Maybe I should, but I
don’t.”
Inmates
said the freedoms awarded on the honor block were not what led to the
escape. Investigators have found that it was a corrections officer and
civilian supervisor who smuggled in the tools that aided Mr. Matt and
Mr. Sweat. And because of security lapses, officials say, Mr. Sweat was
able to spend night after night preparing an escape route, cutting through the backs of their cells, a brick wall and a steel steam pipe.
Investigators
and inmates say that instead of making hourly rounds of the cellblock
each night, as they were supposed to do, most guards slept through much
of their shift.
“Laziness caused that incident, not privileges,” Mr. Davila said.
Inmates joked that the only ones walking the cellblocks on the overnight shift were the cockroaches.
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