DANNEMORA – There was nothing typical about the escape of Richard Matt, 48, and David Sweat, 35, from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora June 6. It turns out there was nothing typical about the prison that housed them, either.

“As the prison population at Clinton grew, (a) system of privileges and rewards and punishment as well, we should add, took shape,” said Jeff Hall, a 36-year-old history professor who specializes in North Country prisons. “It definitely has its own culture.”

That culture has included a church that contains the remains of one of Magellan’s shipwrecks, a ski jump similar to the Olympic ramps found in Lake Placid, a system of prison yard “courts” that provides inmates with their own little slices of turf, and vocational training and “honor block” privileges that may have been a contributing factor in Matt and Sweat’s escape.

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Environment

“Clinton was built in large measure because of the environment of that region,” said Hall. “The prison site was chosen because there was a deposit of iron ore in that area, and so the prison was built right on top of that deposit.”

Hall is the son of a corrections officer who worked at Clinton Correctional for 25 years. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the history of North Country prisons from the 1840s to the 1990s. Although he currently lives in Queens, where he teaches at Queensborough Community College, he grew up in Morrisonville and graduated from Saranac High School in 1997.

Hall said Clinton was originally constructed in part as a response to the violent treatment of prisoners at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining.

“At that time in New York, there was a serious effort to reform prisons, which were known for their brutality,” he said. “If you look at the records of the Correctional Association … (on) the yearly inspections of the prison at Dannemora, they comment quite a bit on the local environment of the Adirondacks. They comment on how they believe the clean air, the high altitude (helped) rehabilitate prisoners.”

The members of the Correctional Association were not the only ones who said the environment contributed to the prisoners’ rehabilitation. Hall said some prisoners wrote of how much they missed the environment, and some of them even planned to relocate to the area after release.

“It continues to play an important role today,” he said. “It can be a blessing and a curse. It can make discovering inmates difficult, and it can make discovering them quite simple.”

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A culture emerges

Clinton Correctional Facility opened in June 1845. Back then, it was a vastly different place.

“Prisoners were actually more free to move around in the area,” Hall said. “The prison had a farm. They had a piggery. There was the prison cemetery. … Prisoners had opportunities to get out into the environment in a way that they don’t today.”

It did, of course, have its share of problems.

“It took all comers,” Hall said. “It took murderers, rapists, petty thieves, burglars. Everybody was sort of mixed in one pot, and it led to a significant amount of violence in the prison.”

Because of that, Hall said the state decided to subdivide the prison population according to offense. This eventually led to the creation of the maximum-security portion of the facility in 1865. Its secure, isolated nature quickly created a culture of its own.

“Compared to the region’s other prisons … Clinton prison’s maximum-security designation does effectively cut off most contact between prisoners and the general public,” Hall said. “They do have interaction with civilian employees, such as Joyce Mitchell (a civilian prison employee who worked in its tailor shop charged with aiding the escapees), for example, but their interactions with local residents is pretty restricted.

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The ‘courts’

Photographer Joshua Freiwald spent a week photographing Clinton Correctional Facility in 1972. Originally from New York, Freiwald now lives in California. He was commissioned by Kaplan & McGlaughlin, a San Francisco architectural firm hired by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s office, to photograph the prison in the wake of 1971’s Attica prison riots to assess its safety and stability. He says he emerged from that week with some of the most powerful images of his decades-spanning career.

“It’s really interesting and, at the same time, scary,” Freiwald said. “When I went there, the warden was worried that someone was going to stab me.

“Everything had a feeling of calm, but underneath that sense of calm, there is an enormous hostility, enormous problems.”

Freiwald was given full access during his time at the prison and became fascinated by its “courts,” sections of the prison yard controlled by prisoners who, over the decades, built up a sort of shantytown.

According to prisonphotography.org, the “courts” are believed to have begun as garden plots in the 20’s or 30’s, but there is no official mention of their existence until the 1950’s.

Freiwald said prisoners are only allowed to use the “courts” during certain hours of the day. His photographs feature prisoners lounging around tables, cooking over barbecue grills and playing football. He said the inmates use whatever they can get their hands on as construction materials.

“The Adirondack chairs – those were built in the prison workshop,” he said. “There was a lot of junk furniture that people sort of had that was redone. The stoves were done from (55-gallon) oil barrels.

“These guys had nothing but time, so they could do anything.”

Former Department of Corrections worker Richard Gonyea of Vermontville, who worked at Clinton for four to six weeks during his on-the-job training in 1982, told the Enterprise the courts appeared to be self-segregated along racial lines

“I was told when I was there that if you didn’t belong to a certain court, you didn’t want to go there” he said.

Freiwald compared the courts to families.

“Not like a (traditional) family, but a family of people with … like interests, that kind of thing,” he said. “A lot of these guys are talented. You know, criminals are not stupid people. They can do whatever you and I could do, and sometimes they’re a lot smarter than we are – they just went in the wrong direction, or they got caught.”

The work produced by many of those talented inmates led to an unlikely display of religious devotion many argue is the most beautiful church in the Adirondacks.

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The Church of St. Dismas

Within the walls of the prison, a Roman Catholic Church dedicated to a thief sits on the grounds.

In 2008, Matt Raab filmed a documentary called “Church of the Good Thief” on the structure, which was dedicated on Aug. 28, 1941.

“St. Dismas was the prisoner that was crucified next to Jesus, the one who said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,'” the Rev. Bill Edwards, the facility’s chaplain at the time of the documentary, said in the film. Although Dismas was never officially canonized by the Roman Catholic Church, Edwards said he is often called the first saint.

The film states the church is the first free-standing church built inside a prison in the United States, and Edwards said the idea of it can be traced back to 1937, when the Rev. Ambrose Hyland became the prison’s chaplain.

In the film, Corrections Officer Gilbert Stevens said most of the church’s materials were refurbished from “whatever they could get their hands on.” Stevens said inmates volunteered to build the church and to create many of its works of art.

“There was an inmate named (Carmelo) Soraci,” he said. “He was initially in prison for forgery.”

Stevens said in the film that a New York City firm instructed Soraci in the art of staining glass, and he quickly became proficient at it, populating the church’s 14 main windows with the faces of inmates. The film states a judge eventually granted Soraci his freedom after seeing his handiwork.

Some aspects of the church had colorful histories. The film states the angel carvings behind the church’s altar came from the remains of Ferdinand Magellan’s flagship, which wrecked in the Philippines in 1521. The pews were built from Appalachian Red Oak donated by former inmate Charles “Lucky” Luciano, a gangster notorious for his role in forming what has been called “The Commission,” the governing body of American organized crime.

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Ski jump

Although it no longer sits on the grounds, another unlikely structure, a ski jump, once stood in the prisonyard. Hall said the jump was there as recently as the late 1980s.

“There were several prisoners who actually became quite skilled and accomplished at ski jumping inside the prison,” he said.

“These guys were on boards they probably shouldn’t have been,” Gonyea said.

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Privileges

Hall said Clinton’s inmates are given privileges such as space on the courts, vocational training and placement on the “honor block” that housed Matt and Sweat for good behavior.

According to the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision’s website, 10 maximum-security prisons have nearly 1,500 cells in “honor blocks.” Although the benefits of honor housing varies from facility to facility, the site states they can include access to late-night recreation, additional television viewing hours, more liberal hours to use collect call-only phones, additional commissary buys, expanded on-unit cooking privileges, use of clothing washer and dryer machines, additional yard privileges and additional hours of shower operations.

As reported June 9 in the Times Union, “the inmates’ assignment on the honor block also allowed them to wear and keep regular clothing other than their prison uniforms.” They said a person briefed on the case but not authorized to speak publicly said the escapees’ green prison uniforms were found in the sewer pipe they used to climb out of a manhole cover a block from the prison.

“My understanding is that the prisoners in that section of the prison actually were placed there as a reward for good behavior,” he said. “They weren’t double-bunked, (which) was one of those privileges that they were afforded.

“I believe … the training they were afforded in the tailor shop is also not something that is available to every single inmate. I believe that is also part of the incentive system.”

The tailor shop put Matt and Sweat in contact with Mitchell, who allegedly aided the duo.

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Does it work?

Freiwald said he considered the “courts” a positive influence on the prison’s population.

“I think that the courts were a place where a lot of people released hostility,” he said. “I think that people did see them as a positive experience, as making a hard-time place filled with guys who would just as soon kill each other as not able to be policed.”

“It’s almost an escape for them,” Edwards said in the film of the church. “It’s like leaving the jail, even though they’re within the walls of the jail, on the weekend. Many of them tell me in this place they find peace.”

Hall said the system of rewards and punishments can be seen as a sort of “carrot and stick” method of psychological control.

“Let’s say you’re facing no possibility of parole – you’re going to be there the rest of your life,” he said. “I think it could be a way to sort of placate a prisoner in that situation.

“They definitely are trying to use this as a way to maintain some semblance of order in the prison when they are dealing with a potentially hostile group of people who knew there was no way out. … I think if we look at the history, just look at the record of 150 years of no escape from that maximum-security sector, this system worked very well.”