Need to reform conditions at MDC unites rivals for congressional posts

August 23, 2022 Raanan Geberer

Councilmember Carlina Rivera speaks outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park, August 2022. Photo: Mary Altaffer/AP.

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From brooklyneagle.com

Sunset Park facility has held celebrity detainees

They may be political rivals, but four candidates for the same office joined others on Tuesday at a press conference in front of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where they asked the federal government to improve conditions at Brook- lyn’s federal jail.

The four are Councilmember Carlina Rivera, former federal impeachment counsel Dan Goldman, U.S. Rep. for the Hud- son Valley region Mondaire Jones, and Assemblymember Yuh-Line Nion.

They, as well as Assemblymember Jo Anne Simon and former U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, are all running to represent the newly-redrawn 10th Congressional district, which encompasses a stretch of Brooklyn from Downtown to Park Slope to Sunset Park as well as Down- town Manhattan.

At the event, they were joined by New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and Comptroller Brad Lander. Al- though Simon wasn’t present,

she, along with the afore- mentioned four candidates, sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Federal Bureau of Prisons documenting some of the problems at the facility, according to Bloomberg News.

Among the problems the candidates cited were a week-long blackout in early 2019 that left detainees without heat or light, four suicides during the past two years, and re-

ports charging incidents of sexual abuse, poor facilities management and more, Bloomberg News added.

The letter said prison officials should make their facility available to unannounced inspections by elected officials and judges, the Daily News added.

In recent years, the MDC, as it’s known, has housed its fair share of high-profile defendants prior to, and during, trial. One was Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite who was eventually convicted of procuring underage girls for financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Another was Nancy Salzman, one of the leaders of the sex cult Nxivm, who was convicted of racketeering conspiracy.

Ronell Wilson, a Staten Island gang member who was convicted of murder- ing two police officers, was held there in 2012 after being removed from federal prison in the Midwest, when his death sentence was vacated. While at the MDC, he fathered a child with a female guard during an illicit rendezvous in the jail’s bathroom.

In April of this year, a former guard at the jail, Jeremy Monk, was charged with smuggling drugs, alcohol and tobacco into the MDC.

Also this year, a group of attorneys claimed they were trapped in the jail during a lockdown for several hours because officers refused to let them leave, the Daily News reported. Two of the lawyers said they weren’t allowed to make calls to tell their children that they’d be late to pick them up from day camp.

The aforementioned blackout in 2019 gave rise to a federal lawsuit. The plaintiffs argued that be- cause of the situation, they experienced “inhumane conditions that posed unreasonable and substantial risks to their health and safety.”

After the World Trade Center disaster of Sept. 11, 2001, some South Asian and Arab Muslim men were rounded up and arrested in “special interest” sweeps and held at the MDC, according to the Eagle. The men, in a lawsuit, later alleged that the then-warden, Dennis Hasty, encouraged and tolerated abuse by the guards, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights.