"The Shawshank Redemption," the top-ranked film on the "IMDB top 250" list of all-time greatest movies, nearly came to life in the past few weeks.
The film, centered on a banker's wrongful murder conviction and subsequent miraculous escape from prison, is widely renowned as an American theater classic. It also gained some recent national attention as the suspected inspiration for a real-life copycat prison escape.
Insert Dannemora, a small, simple town that houses the Clinton Correctional Facility, a men-only, maximum-security state prison in upstate New York, about 20 miles south of the Canadian border. On June 6, 2015, two inmates, Richard Matt and David Sweat, escaped from the prison in stunning Shawshank-esque fashion. Ultimately, though, the men couldn't quite replicate the luck of Andy Dufresne, the film's protagonist, in their breakout attempt.
Matt was serving 25 years to life for murdering and gruesomely dismembering his former boss, while Sweat was serving life without parole for the murder of a sheriff's deputy in 2002. Andy Dufresne, of course, was innocent. To paraphrase Ellis "Red" Redding, Matt and Sweat must have been the only guilty men in Clinton.
According to reports of the investigation, Matt and Sweat had help from Joyce Mitchell, an instructor in the prison's tailor shop where the men worked. (A touch of "Orange is the New Black," perhaps?) Mitchell hid power tools in raw meat and smuggled them into the prison. The men then used the tools to cut holes in the walls of their adjacent cells in the middle of the night. Good thing they didn't use Andy's rock hammer, or it would have delayed their plans by a few years. Joyce Mitchell, much like Red, was a woman who knew how to get things. One must wonder if Sweat and Matt also covered their cell holes with posters of Rita Hayworth.
In the case of Matt and Sweat, institutional corruption didn't work specifically to abuse them and keep them incarcerated, though it looks as if they certainly had some help from inside the prison. However, it is probably safe to say that Matt and Sweat weren't laundering the warden's money in return for special treatment behind bars.
After Matt and Sweat cut the holes, they escaped through the facility's steam pipes. Steam is a far more attractive alternative than what lined pipes that Andy had to crawl through. I can't picture Matt and Sweat crawling through miles of excrement-laden sewer pipes, but I suppose you can't be too picky when attempting to escape from prison.
But for this fugitive duo, there was no happy ending. Matt was spotted and shot dead by a border patrol agent. Two days later, Sweat was shot and captured alive by a lone police sergeant. They never made it to Mexico. There was no hayfield in Buxton, no letter or money hidden under an asphalt rock, no fresh start in Zihuatanejo. Meanwhile, Andy and Red have been living it up in Mexico since 1994.
On a more serious note, tip your hats off to the efforts by law enforcement during the manhunt for these two men. Upstate New York can certainly sleep more peacefully knowing that two escaped cold-blooded killers are both accounted for. As we have seen time and time again, justice always prevails. To quote Warden Norton's favorite fictitious biblical quote, "His judgement cometh, and that right soon." Richard Matt and David Sweat never stood a chance.
