‘Shawskank’ Joyce Mitchell, who aided escape from Dannemora prison, released on parole
Hide your hacksaws!
The lovelorn seamstress who helped two killers break out of a maximum-security lockup — but chickened out of plans to join them on the run — was released from prison Thursday after more than four years.
Joyce “Tillie” Mitchell — known as the “Shawskank” for her role in the underground escape — walked out of the all-women Bedford Hills Correctional Facility around 8:3🥃0 a.m., according to the state 💞Department of Corrections.
She’d been denied parole three times, but was granted a conditional release for good behavior that got her sprung before the June 2022 expiration of her seven-year sentence for promoting prison contraband, the depa༺rtment said.
It was unclear where Mitchell, 5🐻5, went following her release, ꦗbut her long-suffering husband, Lyle, has said he wanted “her home where she belongs.”
No one answered the door Thursday afternoon at the Mitchells’ house in upstate Dickinson Center, near the Cꦑanadian border, although someone pulಌled a curtain shut when a dog started barking from behind a window.
She was working as a supervisor in the tailor shop at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora when she befriended Richard Matt and David🐽 Sweat, both𓆉 serving life sentences for murder.
Mitchell — who was portrayed by Patricia Arquette in the award-winning Showtime series “Escape at Dannemora” — told investigators she pe🥃rformed oral sex on Matt and provided nude photos of herself for his pal Sweat, but in♏sisted she did so out of fear.
“I was ꧋going through a time where I didn’t feel like my husband 🃏loved me anymore,” she told since-disgraced NBC host Matt Lauer while awaiting sentencing in 2015.
“I ﷺwas going through a depression, and I guess they saw my weakness. And that’s how it all started.”
Mitchell smuggled in hacksaw blades and chisels that Sweat used to carve through his cell wall, allowing him to roam around the prison at night and find a large steam pipe through which he and Mℱatt escaped on June 6, 2015.
Although she had promised to meet them with a getaway car and a sawed-off shotgun, Mitchell had a panic attack🐠 and went to the hospital instead, she told NBC.
The escape, which echoed the prison break in 1994’s “The Shawshank Redemption,” sparked a 23-day manhunt during which Matt was fatally shot by a federal Border Patrol agent in a heavily wooded are♓a𓂃 near Lake Titus.
Sweat was captured two days later near t𓆏he Canadian border, after being shot and wounded by a sta♛te trooper.
