By C1 Staff
DANNEMORA — Following controversy sparked by a FOX News report, several correctional officers have stepped forward to explain what’s going on in the scene behind a reporter.
Breitbart reports that while Greta Van Susteren and Molly Line are talking about the latest prison escape from Clinton Correctional Facility, a woman can be seen walking behind Molly toward the prison wall. The woman places something on a rope that is then carried upward and out of the camera shot.
The video sparked concerns among the public about security at the prison, which has experienced its first escape in 170 years.
While the New York State Department of Corrections offered no explanation for what viewers were seeing, retired correctional officers stepped up to the plate.
“What the ‘observant viewer’ saw was not a rope being sent down to an inmate,” one retired correctional officer said. “It was a rope lowered by a tower officer to get some dinner after 16 hours up there.”
Tower officers typically work 8-hour shifts, but the retired officer speculated that their shifts have been lengthened to 16 hours following the escape.
“The only point of access to the guard tower is via a door on the outside that requires a key. Then you walk up a set of stairs to the watch tower room,” another retired correctional officer who worked the guard tower shift at the Clinton Correctional Facility many times said.
“I saw the story and I can tell you that it is nothing,” a third correctional officer said.
“There is no way into the guard tower from inside the prison. The only way is to unlock a door from the outside and climb up. The procedure used to be that the officer on duty is locked in from below. He has the key so no one else can enter his guard tower from below.
“When he is relieved after his tour of duty is up, he sees hi relief officer coming to relieve him and he lowers the bag down to him with the key in it. Then the relief officer can climb up and relieve him. That has been the procedure for as long as I can remember.”
The officers also responded to Van Sustern’s follow-up that everything going into the prison should go in through the front door, calling it unsafe.
“The reason things intended for the guard in the tower don’t go through the front door is because they don’t want to lower a rope inside the compound to get something to the guard. All access to the towers is from the outside,” one officer said. “The reason anything is raised or lowered it’s from the outside is for security purposes.”
“Too much could go wrong if you lowered it from the inside,” another officer said. “When someone approaches a tower from the outside they have to be identified by the tower officer. If you can’t identify the individual, you call the watch commander.”
There are 14 guard towers at Clinton Correctional, and there is no access to any of them from within the prison.
The tower closest to the manhole where the inmates escaped June 6 was unmanned due to budget cuts.