Hundreds of law enforcement officers today are continuing the search for two convicted murderers who escaped from a prison in northern New York over the weekend. State officials have been careful to characterize the flight from the Clinton Correctional in Dannemora as the first from the maximum security portion of the facility. Queensborough Community College Professor of History Jeff Hall, who has written about the history of prisons in the North Country and is a native of the region, tells WAMC’s North Country Bureau Chief Pat Bradley that while that is correct, prisoners from other sections of the facility have gotten out.
Hall says his research has shown that in almost every incident of escapes from North Country prison facilities it was citizen sightings that led to the fugitive’s capture.