Blame-shifting corrections officers beat, choked and threatened inmates with waterboarding at Clinton Correctional Facility during the desperate hunt for two escaped prisoners, inmates claim.
The abuse, alleged in a New York Times report, began just hours after convicted killers Richard Matt and David Sweat slipped out of the upstate prison.
Inmates claimed a goon squad of heavy-handed guards violently interrogated them about the dangerous escapees’ plans.
“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,” inmate Patrick Alexander told the Times. “Then he starts punching me in the face. The other two get up and start hitting me also in the ribs and stomach.”
Alexander, who lived next to the escapees on Clinton’s “honor block,” claimed guards grilled him multiple times and threatened to waterboard him as they scrambled to handle the embarrassing screw up.
Even Gov. Cuomo got in on the act, pausing to question him during a videotaped prison tour.
“Must have kept you awake with all that cutting, huh?” the governor asked.
Cuomo “gave me his best tough guy stare and walked off,” Alexander told the Times.
His allegations were echoed in numerous other complaints filed by inmates who lived on the honor block or worked in the tailor shop with Matt.
“These allegations have been under investigation by the DOCCS Office of Special Investigations for several weeks and have been also been referred to the State Inspector General,” the corrections department said in a statement to the Daily News. “Any findings of misconduct or abuse against inmates will be punished to the full extent of the law.”
The alleged interrogations apparently yielded little to no useful information. Matt and Sweat eluded a massive manhunt for three weeks as they crept through the northern woods.
Matt, drunk and separated from his running partner, was finally shot dead on June 26 near the Canadian border.
A state police sergeant wounded Sweat in a showdown two days later during his capture.
Corrections officers terrorized inmates at Clinton during the search, prisoners claimed.
One of Matt’s former co-workers at the tailor shop claimed guards, one wearing a jacket from the specialized Crisis Intervention Unit, looped a trash bag around his neck like a noose and lifted him up.
“I don’t know how long he hung me up like that because I passed out,” Victor Aponte wrote in a complaint.
Ironically, authorities ultimately found it was prison staffers who helped Matt and Sweat escape.
Joyce Mitchell, a prison seamstress, has pleaded guilty to supplying tools the convicts used in the escape, admitting she did sexual favors for Matt.
State corrections Officer Gene Palmer has also been charged with aiding the two after he allegedly smuggled in tools hidden in frozen meat.
