“URGENT,” the emails were marked. Since Jeffrey Epstein’s death at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, at least 20 reporters and shows from a broad cross section of the nation’s major news outlets have reached out for context and comment about the federal penitentiary. I spent a decade trying to get media outlets to pay attention to the MCC, in Lower Manhattan, pleading with journalists for hours on the phone, over email, and in person to launch investigations of the jail. Over and over, for years, these media organizations did not follow up.
Suddenly, there was urgency to talk about the conditions at MCC. The jail now provided an intriguingly grimy backdrop to an already sordid story. The question is whether a sustained light will actually be shined on the conditions there, or whether the widespread fascination with MCC just becomes part of the spectacle.
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When the news broke about Epstein’s death, Attorney General William Barr said he was shocked, calling for an investigation into the “serious irregularities” at MCC. Then on Tuesday, attempting to foist the blame on underlings, he reassigned the warden and put two guards on administrative leave.
This is willful shock, a deeply disingenuous surprise. The scandal is not a few rogue employees. The surprise is not that a man in federal custody who had shown suicidal tendencies managed to kill himself, nor conversely that a man could be killed behind bars. Barr and his DOJ (like previous DOJ officials) knew MCC was structured on “irregularities.” So did U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman, and his predecessor, Preet Bharara. So did the judges of the Southern District of New York. The federal prison system is replete with “irregularities.”
**The real scandal is that the horrors of MCC have existed for decades, hidden in plain sight. **The journalist Aviva Stahl published a searing exposé last year in Gothamist on conditions at MCC that documented the filth, rodents, overflowing sewage, deeply substandard medical care, wrenching isolation, and often indifferent—and at times, cruel—staff. From reports from lawyers and people imprisoned there, to the legal motions they have filed attempting to mitigate the inhumane conditions, to the hundreds of administrative remedies prisoners have filled out to request remediation (the first step prisoners must take to document problems with their conditions), to the research of scholars and human-rights organizations, the abusive and corrupt conditions at MCC are well documented.
But a broad swath of public officials, from the attorney general on down, have chosen to countenance these conditions—and major news organizations haven’t pressed the issue.
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The public attention to Epstein’s suicide could change that—but only if the public resists the seductive scandal of it all and insists on seeing the structural problems that Epstein’s time at MCC exposes.
First the basics: MCC is a pretrial federal facility run by the Bureau of Prisons, which is part of the Department of Justice and overseen by Congress, that holds people awaiting trial on charges in the Southern District of New York. This means that the people it holds are presumed innocent, and the law ostensibly prohibits their punishment before conviction.
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Lawyers and people held there awaiting trial regularly report appalling conditions. The temperature is not adequately regulated; the facility is often sweltering in the summer and so cold in the winter that prisoners report having trouble thinking and wearing layers of clothes to be able to sleep. A single psychiatrist serves both MCC and the Metropolitan Detention Center, another federal facility located in Brooklyn. People report being “treated” through the slat in their cell door. The facility is run down, and the plumbing and elevators break often.
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According to studies, rates of suicide in jail are higher than in prison. And Epstein had reportedly already made one attempt to take his own life. While MCC is a special breed of hell, its approach to mental health is indicative of the BOP’s broad, cruel indifference to mental-health care. Faced with a spate of suicides in 2012, for instance, the BOP director sent every prisoner in federal custody an absurd letter. “At times you may feel hopeless about your future, and your thought may turn to suicide,” Director Charles E. Samuels wrote. “If you are unable to think of solutions other than suicide, it is not because solutions do not exist; it is because you are currently unable to see them. Do not lose hope.”
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The question now is whether MCC will merely serve as the dirty backdrop to bizarre conspiracy theories and sordid accountings of Epstein’s last hours, allowing the inhumanity to remain hidden in plain sight—or whether Epstein’s death is going to finally force us to see what is going on in Lower Manhattan and insist conditions at MCC finally be addressed.
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