With U.S. Attorney Damian Williams having put the weight of the Justice Department behind the righteous push to have a federal receiver take control of Rikers Island and New York City’s jails, an extraordinary ruling the other day by a Manhattan federal judge called out the “dreadful” conditions in the jail the feds already run here.
There had been two federal lock-ups in the city until Manhattan’s hellish Metropolitan Correctional Center, a place that time forgot, abruptly closed down a couple months after Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell.
That leaves the Metropolitan Detention Center, or MDC, in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
It’s another filthy, badly run place with visible mold, contaminated drinking water and a vermin infestation.
A place where people awaiting trial and not yet convicted of anything are locked up for freezing winters and boiling summers along with people awaiting sentencing and those serving short sentences.
Where routine and urgent health care is “egregiously slow,” and women have been denied basic gynecological care. Where court orders for inmates to receive outside medical attention have been ignored, as though they were court suggestions — like the inmate with a nasty infection who was “mistakenly” sent to a segregated housing unit instead of an outside health facility.
Not at all coincidentally, MDC is also a place that has just 55% of the staffing it’s supposed to and that’s churned through eight wardens and acting wardens in the last three-and-a-half years.
Southern District Judge Jesse Furman detailed all that and more in a ruling on Thursday allowing a 70-year-old to remain free on bail after pleading guilty to intent to distribute drugs containing fentanyl.
Federal law would have required the man to be locked up ahead of his sentencing — unless a court finds clear evidence the person won’t flee or cause a danger to anyone else, and also an “exceptional reason why such person’s detention would not be appropriate.”
The conditions inside of MDC, Furman found, are an “exceptional reason.”
The ruling notes drugs and cellphones are readily available inside the jail despite it being in a “near perpetual” state of lockdown, especially on weekends and holidays.
The parade of horribles goes on, and on.
There was the “planned maintenance” of the electrical system over a four-night lockdown when inmates went without water or power and toilets overflowed because officers didn’t bring buckets of water.
The inmate simply left in a cell with a broken toilet while officers refused to repair it or take him to a working one.
The emergency buttons that would be the only way other than banging and yelling to summon help during those endless lockdowns except that they’ve been mostly broken for years.
Things have deteriorated to the point where, Furman writes, at least two other Southern District judges have let defendants out on bail ahead of sentencing because of what one such judge called MDC’s “unacceptable, inhospitable, terrible” environment.
Another wrote that conditions at MDC and MCC were “as disgusting, inhuman as anything I’ve heard about any Colombian prison, but more so because we’re supposed to be better than that” while referring to their leaders as “morons.”
Those are federal judges talking this way, not advocates.
It’s become “routine,” Furman writes, for judges “to give reduced sentences to defendants based on the conditions in the MDC. Prosecutors no longer even put up a fight, let alone dispute that the state of affairs is unacceptable.”
While Furman’s ruling applies to only one defendant, he concludes that “the time has come to recognize that, however well intentioned as the MDC (and the United State’s Attorney’s Office) may be, there is no way the grim conditions at the jail will materially improve unless the grim staffing shortages are addressed. And there is no way that is going to happen unless the political branches commit considerably more resources to the matter, which seems unlikely to happen any time soon.”
In a closing footnote, the judge adds that “It is ironic, to say the least, that even as the Executive Branch fails to do what needs to be done to tend to its own house, it has — through the United States Attorney’s Office — sought the appointment of an outside receiver to address ‘unsafe, dangerous and chaotic’ conditions in New York City’s jail system.”
How a society treats the people it incarcerates is a basic test of its moral health.
It’s a test we are failing at every level of government.
Siegel (harry@thecity.nyc) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.
Harry Siegel: There’s no magic Justice fix for jails, just us
6
1
07.01.2024
With U.S. Attorney Damian Williams having put the weight of the Justice Department behind the righteous push to have a federal receiver take control of Rikers Island and New York City’s jails, an extraordinary ruling the other day by a Manhattan federal judge called out the “dreadful” conditions in the jail the feds already run here.
There had been two federal lock-ups in the city until Manhattan’s hellish Metropolitan Correctional Center, a place that time forgot, abruptly closed down a couple months after Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell.
That leaves the Metropolitan Detention Center, or MDC, in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
It’s another filthy, badly run place with visible mold, contaminated drinking water and a vermin infestation.
A place where people awaiting trial and not yet convicted of anything are locked up for freezing winters and boiling summers along with people awaiting sentencing and those serving short sentences.
Where routine and urgent health care is “egregiously slow,” and women have been denied basic gynecological care. Where court orders for inmates to receive outside medical attention have been ignored, as though........
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