(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Unless inmates pose a clear flight risk or a danger to the community, a U.S. district judge has said that he won’t incarcerate them in the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center due to its hellish conditions.
“The court holds that the conditions at the MDC constitute ‘exceptional reasons’ why detention of most defendants who do not pose a risk of flight or danger to the community, including Chavez, ‘would not be appropriate,’” U.S. Judge Jesse Furman said in an opinion Thursday in the case of Gustavo Chavez, who was arrested in April 2022 for possessing fentanyl.
Judge Furman cited three main reasons for condemning the MDC: its endless lockdowns, lack of healthcare and broken-down physical conditions.
According to Judge Furman, inmates at the MDC have been on lockdown for much of the last three weeks following an assault on staff, with a maximum of “two hours outside their cells each day.”
Judge Furman noted that lockdowns were initially justified to slow the spread of COVID-19, but that is no longer the case. Furman added that “in Orwellian fashion, the Bureau of Prisons does not refer to these periods as ‘lockdowns’; instead, it refers to them as ‘modified operations.’”
Perhaps even more shocking than the lockdowns was Judge Furman’s description of MDC’s healthcare offerings.
The judge said MDC is “egregiously slow in providing necessary medical and mental health treatment to inmates—especially where such care requires the attention of outside providers.”
“It has become common for defense counsel to require court intervention to ensure that inmates receive basic care—and, even more shocking, not uncommon for court orders to go unheeded,” he said.
In one instance cited by the judge, “the MDC defied an order to transport a defendant for surgery to repair his cheek, which had been broken by another inmate at a previous facility; the defendant was eventually informed that his cheek would have to be rebroken before the surgery because it had healed improperly on its own.”
Then, there’s the MDC’s physical conditions, which Furman said have long been problematic.
Furman described visible mold on walls and ceilings, contaminated drinking water, vermin infestation, mouse droppings falling through HVAC vents, and roaches and flies in showers— problems that came to the fore in the winter of 2019, when a power outage left inmates without light and heat for a full week.
“More recently, the Court was advised that many, if not most, of the emergency call buttons in the MDC’s main building are not working—even though those buttons are the only way (other than yelling and banging) to call an officer in emergency situations during a lockdown,” Furman said.
Furman said much of the jail’s problems stem from staffing shortages and overcrowding. The facility is the most crowded since inmates had to be transferred there temporarily in 2021, when the Metropolitan Correction Center—where Jeffrey Epstein and other high-profile—was shuttered.
More than 1,600 inmates are housed at MDC.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
