Woman who helped killers escape set for early prison release

ALBANY, N.Y. >> The former prison tailor serving time for helping two killers pull off a “Shawshank Redemption”-style escape from a northern New York correctional facility will soon walk free.

Joyce Mitchell, 55, is tentatively approved for conditional release on Feb. 8 after a prison staff committee determined she had earned time off for good behavior, according to a statement from the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. The state Board of Parole has denied Mitchell’s attempts at freedom three times, most recently in June.

Mitchell is serving 2 1/3 to seven years in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for helping Richard Matt and David Sweat escape from the state prison in Dannemora in June 2015. She provided tools they used to cut and chisel through walls and pipes at Clinton Correctional Facility in a prison break featured in the 2018 Showtime miniseries “Escape at Dannemora.”

Clinton County Sheriff David Favro said Mitchell should serve a full seven years. “With the egregiousness of her actions, and the jeopardy she put our society in as a whole, it is a mockery of our system to let her out after a couple of years,” Favro told the Plattsburgh Press-Republican.

The three-week manhunt to capture Matt and Sweat cost more than $23 million and involved hundreds of state and local law enforcement officers. Matt was eventually shot dead and Sweat was shot, captured and put behind bars for life.

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