Two prison guards—correctional officers, or COs, as it goes in the lingo—are sitting around, waiting for their shift to end. One is asking that what the hell the world has come to when the inmates are allowed to have TV sets in their cells. The other clucks sympathetically to a complaint he’s heard many times from many colleagues, but then offers some realpolitik counsel: “What’s the alternative? You’ve got a guy in the cell all days, wondering, ‘How do I kill this guy with a toothbrush?'”
Nobody plots to kill any correctional officers (husbands are not so lucky) in Escape at Dannemora, Showtime’s excellent miniseries recreation of the 2015 escape from an upstate New York prison that captured the country’s attention for a month.
But the principle is central to both the show and the prison experience: Inmates with little to lose sit around all day long, brooding about how to manipulate a situation that’s at best lethally monotonous and, at worst, just plain lethal, to their own advantage. Television critic Glenn Garvin has more.
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