Since local newspapers interviewed Jeff Hall Sunday, the 36-year-old North Country prison historian has become a go-to expert source as media throughout the U.S. and Canada cover two inmates’ escape from Clinton Correctional Facility.

“It’s become a monster,” said Hall, who grew up in Morrisonville and whose father worked at the Dannemora prison. “It’s taken on a life of its own.”

After Press-Republican and Enterprise interviews came the Associated Press, New York magazine and Northeast Public Radio (WAMC) in Albany. This morning, he said, a car is supposed to pick him up at his home in Queens and drive him to a CNN live television interview with Chris Cuomo – brother of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo who made himself the face of this news story on the day it broke.

Hall also may soon be on the air in Canada via CKTB, a talk radio station in St. Catharines, Ontario, near Buffalo.

“None of my other work is getting done,” he said with a laugh. He’s nervous “because I’ve never been on TV. If it was Channel 5, I’d be fine.”

After graduating from Saranac High School, college and graduate school, Hall became a history professor at Queensborough Community College in Queens. To get his Ph.D. he wrote his dissertation on the history of North Country prisons and expects that to be the topic of his first book. As part of that research, he learned a lot about escapes – just in time to satisfy an international audience hungry to learn more about these facilities and the many people who got out of them.

He can tell you about the goofy ones as well as the grisly. For instance, he said, in December 1982, a couple months after Camp Gabriels minumum-security prison opened, some inmates walked away from a work detail. As their first order of business, they tried to buy beer at a Gabriels store, but the owner called police instead.