The question everyone wanted to know after the Dannemora escape was how the two killers were able to break out of a maximum-security prison. In 2015, Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered the state’s inspector general to launch an investigation that interviewed more than 175 people and found many lapses in security at the prison. Front gate searches of staff that should have caught the hacksaw blades and tools weren’t happening. Night counts were “grossly inadequate.”
The report said that over the 85 nights that inmate David Sweat labored in the tunnels beneath the prison, there should have been 400 inmate checks. If even one of those had been done properly, it would have “instantly foiled the escape plot.” Cell searches weren’t being done properly either, missing the holes, more than a foot wide, that the men had cut.
This week, the state’s current Inspector General, Lucy Lang, hosted a panel discussion that included comments from her predecessor Catherine Leahy Scott who oversaw the year-long investigation. Also joining the discussion were the retired heads of both the state police & department of corrections who talked about the lasting impact the escape had on prison administration and oversight. The 150-page report was released a year after the escape.
You can read it and watch that entire panel discussion: https://ig.ny.gov