Ex-inmate reveals how different types of criminals are treated in prison - from 'school shooters' who are 'tortured beyond means' to 'child molesters' who are beaten to death

"Criminals prey on people weaker than they are more often than they engage in honorable combat."

When I first started working in NY State's Corrections, I was at Auburn, a maximum security facility with cell blocks. I spent a little over three years there. It's an old prison...constructed in 1816. Buffalo Bill held his Wild West Show there for the inmates one year. The prison was the site of the first electric chair execution in 1908. Chester Gillette was convicted of murdering Grace Brown on Big Moose Lake in Herkimer County, NY. He took her out on the lake, clubbed her with a tennis racket and threw her overboard. They found her body the next day. He was tried and convicted, and executed. Gillette's character was used as the fictional character in Theodore Dreiser's novel "An American Tragedy." The story they told me when I started there, was that the people of Auburn were offered the choice of getting a prison, or becoming the Capital of the State, and they chose the prison. Don't know if it's true, but it's a good story.

During my time at Auburn, there were a lot of lifers doing time for murder. Many of them had already served many years for their crimes, and because of their behavior records, were on the Honor Housing gallery, and also had jobs as cooks in the officer's mess hall, or as the facility firemen, etc. All they wanted to do was do their time, and not have to deal with a-holes.

I'm a female...75 now. I worked only in male facilities my whole career. Personally, I don't recall an inmate being attacked for violence against a woman on the street. It might have happened. Hell, we had Winston Moseley, who murdered Kitty Genovese in New York City in 1964. I was a junior in highschool at the time, and remembered the story. He was doing life for her murder, and while he was at Attica, he escaped from the custody of the officers who had escorted him to the outside hospital. He had inserted an item or item (I was told it was a light bulb), up his butt deliberately, just so he would be taken outside the prison. While he was on the run, he broke into the home of an older couple who were not staying in the home at the time. They got a call from a neighbor who told them the house may have been broken into. When they went to check on the property, Moseley took them hostage, made them both strip, tied them up, and repeatedly raped the woman in front of her husband.

He was eventually captured and ended up at Auburn at some point. Back then the department allowed inmate visits every day of the week. Once a week, and elderly woman would come to visit him, and leave money for his account, or bring packages for him. It turned out that the woman, was the same woman he had held hostage and raped.

While at Auburn, he had a porter's job in the Administration Building, which was separated from the prison via an electrified sally port door controlled by an officer in a console. A simple stairwell took you to the main hall of the Admin building. He was the only inmate that ever got that close to the outside of the walls. As porter he was in contact with the female clerical staff of the facility every day. I'm sure he was in his glory. He thought he was a ladies' man. He was far from it. He was evil, and I'll never understand how someone doing time for such a vicious murder, and had escaped custody, ended up getting such a job in the Admin Building. The bastard finally croaked in 2016

There were plenty of inmates doing time for crimes against women in the system. Most of them you didn't know what they were doing time for. The department frowned upon officers searching an inmates record. I had a young white rapist working as a clerk for me while I was running the phone program at Auburn. I don't remember him having any problems with anyone. Not long after he started working for me, I found out what he was doing time for. I asked the male Counselor who had why he had placed him with me, and he said: "You've got nothing to worry about, he only rapes young girls." HA HA.

In 1981, Correctional Officer trainee Donna Payant was murdered at Green Haven facility by convicted murderer Lemuel Smith. He was already doing time for at least five other murders when he murdered Payant. She was married with three children. Her husband was also an officer, but working at another facility where they lived. Smith was born in 1941, and is still alive behind bars. He is also a known sex offender. As the clerk to the prison chaplain, he had access to a phone. He called Payant, pretending to be an officer, and lured her to the office. He strangled her, and savaged her body. He wrapped her in plastic, put her body in a 55-Gallon drum, and placed it in one of the prison dumpsters, which were then emptied into a garbage truck and taken to a dump 20 miles away.

Once the facility realized she was missing, they shut the prison down and did a facility wide search. They brought in search dogs who traced her to the dumpster site. They then went to the dump site and found her body. At the trial an expert matched his bite marks from a previous murder, to the bite marks on Payant's breasts. New York State at the time had the death sentence for inmates who committed murder while in prison. Smith had the high-profile legal team of William Kunstler and C. Vernon Mason. Despite all their efforts to denigrate Payant, Smith was found guilty of her murder, and sentenced to die. He successfully appealed his case, got the death penalty law repealed, and was given another life sentence in its place.

According to Wikipedia, he spent over 20 years in segregation. Whether he's still in segregation or not, I have no idea. I do know that at some point after he was convicted of Payant's murder, they created a special sized cell for him, making one big cell out of two for him, and that he was allowed to have a TV in his cell. According to NY State's inmate locator, he's currently at the maximum security prison, Wende Correctional Facility in Alden, N.Y.

I went to Donna Payant's funeral with a group of officers from Auburn. Many years later, her husband Leo was working at my facility as Captain.

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