We are, as our pages will attest, both constantly trying to find out more about the deplorable conditions on Rikers Island and consistently appalled about what we learn. Yet we don’t want to leave the impression that the city is the only entity capable of thoroughly dropping the ball when it comes to detention conditions in New York.
The federal government is holding its own just as well, as evidenced by the two lockups that the feds run in the five boroughs, MCC in Manhattan and MDC in Brooklyn, the latter of which was the focus of a Tuesday press conference and letter from several candidates for the downtown/Brooklyn open congressional seat, who rightly put their differences aside to jointly call on the Biden administration to intervene aggressively.
Before we had the banging of pots and pans to celebrate health-care workers in the chaotic first months of the pandemic, the sound of arrhythmic metallic pounding around Sunset Park signified something much darker: the protestations of detainees who were slowly freezing in the dead of winter at MDC, which had no heat even as temperatures dipped near zero in early 2019.
This turned out not to be a fluke, but the outcome of a persistent lack of upkeep and repairs throughout the hulking facility, which can house more than 1,600 federal prisoners. When not being victimized by the environment itself, detainees have been left with festering wounds and untreated suicidal crises, as detailed by no less than a federal judge who visited the facility upon suspecting that the Bureau of Prisons was lying about conditions.
She was right, adding attempted coverup to the long record of negligence and misconduct by prison officials, who never seem to face consequences; in fact, the warden who presided over the blackout was promoted. Detention is not and cannot be a justification for conditions that in some cases amount to torture and risk of death. The federal government must begin remedying its myriad failures immediately.
