The Prison Down the Street
When the new head of CBS News, Bari Weiss, recently forced the cancellation of a 60 Minutes investigative report on abuses at the notorious “mega prison” in El Salvador known as CECOT where the Trump Administration has sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants, the piece was mistakenly still aired in Canada and, for a time, went viral on the internet, broadly exposing both the lack of due process afforded many of the migrants before their deportation and the horrific treatment to which they were subjected. When they were finally released, the migrants reported serious abuse during their imprisonment, including torture, beatings and starvation, repellant conduct you’d hope would be condemned by any civil society. But that hope would be futile, at least in the United States, because as much as we feign outrage at horrific prison conditions in other countries, the sad truth is that we’ve long accepted similar mistreatment and actual abuse of prisoners in our own correctional facilities.
I live less than three miles away from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, the large federal jail where Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, was taken following his shocking capture by U.S. armed forces on Saturday night. That jail may sound familiar to you; in recent years, it’s also been home to numerous other high-profile criminal defendants, including Sean “Diddy” Combs, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Ghislaine Maxwell. The M.D.C. became the only federal lock up in New York City after the infamous Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan (think John Gotti, Bernie Madoff, and “El Chapo”) closed in the summer of 2021 after years of horrendous conditions and alleged mismanagement (including sewage floods, rodent infestations, security breaches, and a less-than-robust response to Covid-19) culminated in Jeffrey Epstein’s suspicious death at the jail.
Since the closure of the M.C.C. in Manhattan, all federal detainees in New York City are held at the M.D.C.’s facility at the northern end of a rebuilt and rebranded section of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park waterfront now known as “Industry City.” That rebuilding means the jail’s “hulking concrete structure” is now adjacent to an area described on the Industry City website as a “bustling workplace” that, after hours and on weekends, “becomes Brooklyn’s unofficial backyard, offering live music, festivals, great dining, and exciting retail experiences.” Located in what was an “underutilized complex with no retail,” Industry City “has evolved into a destination where innovation, culture, and community converge.”
The website doesn’t oversell things; Industry City actually is quite nice. It’s fun to watch chocolate being made at LiLac Chocolates, enjoy lunch at the food court or Sahadi’s, or score a few deals at the West Elm outlet store. What’s bizarre is that this “thriving ecosystem” with “something for every type of New Yorker” is right next to a prison described as “notorious,” “deeply troubled,” and “plagued by scandal.”
These euphemisms hide a litany of awful facts. For example, in 2018, a former corrections officer was convicted of sexually assaulting female prisoners at the M.D.C. In 2019, a fire at the facility triggered a week-long power outage during a period of intensely cold weather, leaving detainees freezing in dark cells with toilets that wouldn’t flush and no access to food, medical care, or phone calls. And as recently as the summer of 2024, two inmates were stabbed to death in separate incidents at the jail.*
Given the terrible crimes some of the prisoners at the M.D.C. are charged with, you may find it hard to work up much sympathy for them. In fact, it may be hard to pay attention to the prison at all. Who wants to interrupt their exploration of Industry City’s many delights to think about the potential horrors going on next door? But keep in mind that most of the people being held at the M.D.C. have not been charged with violent crimes, and many (if not most) are pretrial detainees, meaning they haven’t been convicted of anything yet. And even if they have been found guilty of a serious offense, as the famous quote (apparently misattributed to Dostoevsky) goes, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” Do we want to keep turning a blind eye to the abuses in our own backyard while railing about abuses abroad? Perhaps the M.D.C. is not nearly as bad as CECOT; I certainly hope not. Our shame should be in how bad it actually is—and how little is being done to change it.
*Inhumane conditions and prisoner abuse are obviously not limited to New York or federal facilities; as just one example, the nightmarish treatment of inmates in Alabama’s state prisons was depicted in painful detail in last year’s powerful documentary, The Alabama Solution, now showing on HBO Max or whatever it is they’re calling themselves these days.