On a warm night in June 1845, two inmates recently escaped from the newly opened Clinton State Prison in Dannemora, New York lay still in a bug-infested swamp not eight hundred feet from the prison wall, contemplating their next move. After absconding from the penitentiary earlier that day, the duo spent hours in hopeless pursuit of freedom a few miles north in Canada. To their dismay, the men discovered the rugged, undeveloped environment surrounding the prison—high in the northeast corner of the Adirondack Mountains—posed a formidable challenge to even the most experienced backcountry explorer. Disoriented by thick underbrush, dense forests, biting insects, and mountains as far as the eye could see, the prisoners ascended and then unwittingly descended nearby Dannemora Mountain, completing a circular route that landed them back within sight of the roughhewn, wooden stockade by nightfall.
Determined to remain free, the inmates embarked the next morning on a road bearing east toward Plattsburgh, with Lake Champlain visible in the distance. Having concealed their identities long enough to enjoy breakfast at the cabin of a local widow, the prisoners continued their journey, only to be interrupted by the sounds of gunshots and barking dogs. Dashing into the woods, officers shot and apprehended one of the men, while the remaining fugitive spent a second night in the wilderness before surrendering the following day. The failure of Clinton’s first escapees both helped to expose flaws in prison security and, more importantly for our story, demonstrated the centrality of nonhuman nature to the operation of correctional facilities in New York’s northern forests.
One hundred seventy years later, a pair of prisoners made international headlines after escaping from the same penitentiary—since renamed Clinton Correctional Facility—into an environment that remained as forbidding as it had been nearly two centuries earlier. Equally impressive was the fact that that same environment helped shield the fugitives—Richard Matt and David Sweat—from officers armed with sophisticated surveillance technologies and weapons that searchers back in 1845 could only have dreamt about. While journalists, politicians, and news consumers in June 2015 spent weeks tracking the manhunt, exploring how the inmates escaped, and unearthing official misconduct and corruption behind the prison walls, one of the central players in the history of American prisons—the natural environment—lay hidden, much like Clinton escapees past and present, in plain sight.