New York taxpayers shelled out at least $23 million in the 2015 search for Richard Matt and David Sweat after their escape from the upstate Clinton Correctional Facility — and now they’re about to shell out more.

Or, as the Empire Center’s E.J. McMahon told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: “You’ve heard of the gift that keeps on giving? This is the escape that keeps on costing.”

The producers of the eight-part Showtime series “Escape from Dannemora” have applied for the state’s lucrative film-tax credits, reports Empire State Development, which runs the handout program.

The state budgets $420 million a year for this giveaway, a credit of up to 30 percent of production costs. And it’s a refundable credit — so that taxpayers actually cut checks to many productions.

Plus, it covers even filming that would clearly happen here anyway . . . such as a docudrama about a New York prison break.

With Benicio del Toro and Paul Dano as the escapees and Patricia Arquette as the prison worker who helped them, the Ben Stiller-directed show may well be excellent. And Empire State Development says it likely created “several thousand hires and significant economic spend[ing] in New York over weeks of filming.”

So what? Nothing justifies a special giveaway to this one industry — especially at the expense of all the less-sexy ones that create permanent jobs as well as “significant” other spending.

The mindset behind this outrageous subsidy is gradually sucking New York dry.