Last week, the New York Times reported allegations that prison guards systematically tortured inmates at Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York following the high profile escape of two inmates.
More than 60 prisoners filed complaints claiming that they suffered abuse, including beatings, stranglings and death threats. Most significant, however, was the apparent personal involvement of New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, in these brutal actions.
Just hours before state prison guards without name tags descended upon the cell block to torture the escapees’ fellow prisoners, Cuomo had visited the prison, asking one inmate, in the presence of the media, why he did not hear the escapees cutting through their prison bars. “[It] must have kept you awake with all that cutting, huh?” before giving him “his best tough-guy stare,” according to the prisoner, and walking off.