By Kim Smith Dedam
Press-Republican
DANNEMORA — On or about May 15 each year, correction officers gather at Green Haven Correctional in Stormville to remember Donna Payant.
The Dannemora woman’s murder in the prison on May 15, 1981, marked the first on-duty death of a female prison guard in New York state.
Payant was 31, the mother of three children. Her husband, Leo, was a guard at Clinton Correctional Facility; her father had worked at the Dannemora prison for more than 28 years.
Her brutal murder was the first killing on prison grounds since the notorious Attica uprising of 1971, 10 years prior.
Events at both Green Haven and Attica charged New York’s Department of Correctional Services — now the State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision — to re-examine its policy and prison protocols for inmates and officers alike.
Calls and email requests from the Press-Republican to the Inspector General’s Office netted no response for an update on the ongoing investigation into the June 6 escape at Clinton Correctional Facility.
But history tells how earlier prison calamities shifted State Corrections policy in the past.
GREEN HAVEN CORRUPTION
Even before Payant’s murder at Green Haven, an official investigation was completed into the escape of convicted cop killer Albert Victory, who walked away from a hotel room in July 1980 while on an outing provided as a special favor from a correction officer.
It describes how Green Haven had become a “free-for-all” where: “inmates roamed freely about the facility. Veteran correction officers, in disagreement with and demoralized by the new liberal attitudes, sought new assignments which offered as little inmate contact as possible.
“The most junior officers were placed in direct charge of the most violent felons. In addition, the high percentage of transfers of both inmates and officers, to and from Green Haven, caused an ebb and flow that fostered disorientation and a lack of security.”
And, it said, “inmates were accorded new privileges, discipline was relaxed, and sanctions against prisoners were strictly controlled.”
FAVORS
“A system of granting ‘favors’ to inmates developed,” the Green Haven report says.
“Small favors to inmates gave way to larger ones, and the price exacted by the guards was not only prison peace but cash and gifts.
“At Green Haven, corruption on a large and regular scale became institutionalized.”
Not all correction officers were dishonest, the report summarized. “But honest officers failed to report the corruption and favor taking of others.
“What has been described as a ‘let’s make a deal’ attitude prevailed,” the Green Haven investigation found.
“As long as another Attica was prevented, as long as anyone, inmate or officer, could ‘keep the lid on,’ various rules and regulations were ignored.”
PRISON MURDER
The free-for-all didn’t work for Payant, who had been on the job for just a month when she was killed.
She had just begun her 1-to-9 p.m. work shift when she was lured to Green Haven’s Catholic chaplain’s office by a telephone call.
No one at the prison reported Payant missing until 6 p.m., court records show.
By then, her strangled, bitten and lifeless body had been wrapped in three garbage bags and tossed into a compacting truck then delivered to the landfill some 25 miles from the Dutchess County prison.
Detectives looked there after dogs traced her scent to the prison’s trash collection area.
Convicted serial killer and rapist Lemuel Smith worked maintenance in the chaplain’s rooms.
A bite mark on Payant’s body proved to be key evidence in convicting Smith, who is now elderly and wheelchair bound, according to retired correction officers.
He is incarcerated at Five Points Correctional, where Clinton escapee David Sweat is being held.
In 1984, an Appeals Court commuted Smith’s death sentence to life in prison, finding it was unconstitutional.
IMPROVED OFFICER TRAINING
Reforms after Payant’s murder in 1981 retooled some safety protocol for prison guards.
Due to a shortage of correction officers, many at that time received abbreviated training to get them on the job more quickly — a couple of weeks for some and only 40 to 48 hours for others before being assigned to duty.
According to a 1981 report in the Evening News in Newburgh, Payant had completed a training course of about three weeks.
After her death, DOCS returned to the more lengthy schooling.
Current protocol at the Correctional Services Training Academy now requires a minimum of eight weeks of formal training, according to DOCCS website.
“Paid training at the academy will include academic courses in such areas as emergency response procedures, interpersonal communications, legal rights and responsibilities, security procedures, and concepts and issues in corrections,” department information says.
Correction training also involves “rigorous physical training to develop fitness, strength and stamina.”
‘LAXNESS IN SYSTEM’
At Green Haven 34 years ago, the report found: “the security breakdown fostered escapes, as individual prisoners began to take advantage of the corruption and laxness in the system and the attitude of prison officials.
“Examples of these escapes range from Albert Victory, who escaped by paying his guards to drink in a bar while he went to a motel room with his girlfriend; to William Cody, who walked away because no one knew or followed prison regulations that prohibited a parole violator from working outside the wall; to Herminio Espinal and Antonio Capoul, who escaped simply by taking advantage of the normal chaos in the visiting room.”
Bits and pieces of the puzzle of Sweat’s and Richard Matt’s breakout from the legendarily secure Dannemora prison have leaked out, but most of the big picture remains missing.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has said in news interviews that the problem won’t require legislation to repair; he looks instead to take some type of executive or administrative action once the investigations are complete.
CORRUPTION REPORT
At Green Haven’s Payant Memorial on May 16, 2011, then Department of Corrections and Community Supervision Commissioner Brian Fischer waxed philosophical on ever-changing challenges in corrections work.
“We seem to be living in a time of unanswered questions and problems often beyond our ability to control,” he said, according to transcripts of that speech.
“Every day we go to work hoping that things will work themselves out, yet quietly wondering to ourselves what else could go wrong.
“While on the one hand our system is growing smaller, our responsibilities are growing larger.
“Each of us has to face our issues. Sometimes, we have to do it alone, other times with help from others.”