(AP) -- A prison employee being questioned about her suspected role in the escape of two killers provided them with contraband before they cut their way out of the maximum-security institution, a prosecutor said Friday.

District Attorney Andrew Wylie would not specify the prohibited items that Joyce Mitchell allegedly supplied but said they weren't the power tools that David Sweat and Richard Matt used to break out last weekend.

Contraband behind bars can include such things as cellphones, weapons, drugs, tools and unauthorized clothing.

Wylie said authorities are "learning more and more information each day from her as far as establishing a timeline on how this process occurred and what her involvement was."

Mitchell, an instructor at the prison tailor shop, where the two convicts worked, has not been charged.

A son told NBC earlier this week that she would not have helped the inmates escape and that she checked herself into a hospital with chest pains Saturday, the day the breakout was discovered.

The district attorney said he is considering two charges against Mitchell: accessory to escape and promoting prison contraband.

On Thursday, a person close to the investigation said that Mitchell had befriended the two men and agreed to be the getaway driver but never showed up. The person was not authorized to discuss the case and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Sweat, 34, and Matt, 48, cut through steel and bricks and crawled through a steam pipe, emerging from a manhole outside the 40-foot walls of the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, about 20 miles south of the Canadian border.

About 500 state, federal and local law enforcement officers Friday began a seventh day of trying to track down the convicts, with search teams slogging up to their knees through swamps and streams swarming with bloodsucking insects. Schools and the main road into Dannemora were closed for a second day.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday that investigators are "talking to several people who may have facilitated the escape." He warned that the law will come down hard on any prison system employee who crosses the line.

"If you do it, you will be convicted, and then you'll be on the other side of the prison that you've been policing, and that is not a pleasant place to be," the governor said.

A longtime neighbor was stunned by the suspicions swirling around Mitchell.

"I just can't believe she'd do something so stupid," neighbor Sharon Currier said. She said Mitchell is "not somebody who's off the wall."

She said Mitchell is a former town tax collector in Dickinson, a community near Dannemora. Skilled at sewing, she has worked for at least five years at the prison, where her husband is also employed, Currier said.

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Virtanen reported from Albany. Associated Press writers Jennifer Peltz and Lejla Sarcevic in New York and Chris Carola in Albany contributed to this report.