Escape puts spotlight on staff-inmate relationships

NEWYORK — Training to work in maximum-security prisons includes stern warnings that add up to one message: Don’t get too close to the inmates.

Never treat the relationship as anything other than professional. Never reveal personal details an inmate could use to compromise you. And never forget you are dealing with hardened, often cunning criminals.

Investigators say prison tailor shop instructor Joyce Mitchell ignored those admonitions with frightening consequences, actually helping a pair of convicted killers make their breakout from upstate New York’s Clinton Correctional Facility. She pleaded not guilty Friday night to charges of felony promoting prison contraband and misdemeanor criminal facilitation linked to the escape.

It doesn’t have a catchy name like Stockholm syndrome — in which hostages become sympathetic to their captors — but the phenomenon of improper ties between inmates and prison staffers has been a touchy subject in corrections for years.

“It’s embarrassing to the industry, it’s embarrassing to management, but it occurs,” said Michael Alexander, who spent over a decade working in different prisons and who has written about inmate and staff relationships.

Immersed in a world of inmates who can be excellent manipulators, some prison workers wind up doing inappropriate things for them out of compassion, greed or romantic attraction, experts say. Other staffers are swayed by inmates’ threats to harm their loved ones or expose the workers for breaking a rule.

“You spend more waking hours with them than your family, you get to know them, you see them age over the years,” said Caterina Spinaris, executive director of Desert Waters Correctional Outreach, a training organization. “You have to be very cognizant of the need to maintain distance.”

In Mitchell’s case, she was investigated months before last weekend’s breakout over a pos- sible relationship with one of the escapees. The two were apparently separated for a while, but the investigation didn’t turn up anything that warranted firing or disciplining her, District Attorney Andrew Wylie said.

Court documents say she smuggled hacksaw blades, chisels, a punch and a screwdriver bit to help the men escape.

On Saturday, the huge manhunt resumed, with more than 800 law officers concentrating in a rural area in the Adirondacks around the prison in Dannemora.