Justice Behind Bars: Judge Furman calls out the nightmarish conditions at the Brooklyn MDC

By Emily FUrman

While most New Yorkers enjoy their Easter and Passover meals this Spring, dozens of MDC Brooklyn detainees endure a different kind of cuisine— dishes tainted by maggots and weevils, according to reports by several Federal Defenders. Despite MDC officials confirming such gross contaminations, inmates continue to be served insect-laden meals. 

Bug-infested food is only the latest episode in a long string of below-par conditions and neglect at the federal Bureau of Prisons’ Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, which houses 1,600 New York City detainees waiting for their federal trials. It is the only federal lockup in the city. And it stinks.

In a scathing January 2024 decision, Southern District of New York Judge Jesse Furman refused to send a defendant to MDC Brooklyn due to the horrific housing conditions found there. The defendant, Gustavo Chavez, a 70-year-old with dangerous health issues, had pled guilty to selling drugs containing fentanyl. Although Chavez now faces a potential sentence of up to twenty years, he will not be detained in the infamous Sunset Park lockup while he awaits his sentencing. The Court determined that poor conditions at MDC qualified as an “exceptional reason” under 18 U.S.C. § 3145(c) § 3143(a)(2) as justification for the defendant’s continued release.

In a 19-page decision, Judge Furman calls the MDC conditions “dreadful” and “longstanding.” Judge Furman points to numerous complaints regarding “near perpetual lockdowns no longer explained by COVID-19,” delays in medical care, widespread contraband, and four inmate suicides in the past three years. Judge Furman writes: “It has gotten to the point that it is routine, for judges in both this District and the Eastern District to give reduced sentences to defendants based on the conditions of confinement in the MDC. Prosecutors no longer even put up a fight, let alone dispute that the state of affairs is unacceptable.”

One reason for the deteriorating conditions is the extreme staffing shortage MDC faces. According to one study, as of November 2023, only 200 of 301 of its non-supervisory correctional officer positions were filled and, of those 200 officers, 34 were either on extended leave or about to be transferred. MDC operates with only 55% of its full correctional officer staffing level, resulting in an untenable ten-to-one ratio of prisoners to officers. Judge Furman contends, “the best the courts can do is not add unnecessarily to the inmate population and thereby avoid exacerbating the already frightening staff-to-inmate ratio.”

The most conspicuous consequence of the MDC staffing shortage is the inordinate amount of time the jail’s inmates spend on lockdown—barred from leaving their cells for visits, calls, showers, classes, or exercise. Inmates at the MDC are sometimes locked down for almost three weeks at a time, with a maximum of two hours outside their cells each day. One defendant who kept a log of lockdowns, reported that he had been locked down for 137 days, or more than half of the 245 days he spent at the facility.

Government prosecutors and the Bureau of Prisons can no longer use COVID-19 to justify the long periods inmates remain locked in their cells. Judge Furman concurs that confining inmates to their cells is tantamount to solitary confinement, a practice whose detrimental psychological effects, including increased risk of anxiety, depression, and suicidal tendencies, are well documented. One study found that compared to formerly incarcerated individuals who have not experienced restrictive housing, individuals who spent any time in restrictive housing were 24% more likely to die within a year after release, with significantly higher risks of suicide (78%) and homicide (54%). Moreover, they faced a 127% increased likelihood of dying from an opioid overdose within the first two weeks post-release.

In addition to harmful lockdowns, Judge Furman criticizes the jail for being “egregiously slow” in providing necessary medical and mental health care. General denials or delays of care are routine. It is not uncommon for court intervention to become necessary for inmates to receive even the most basic care, and those court orders often go unheeded. 

In a recent case, MDC repeatedly defied an order to transfer a defendant suffering from an MRSA infection to a medical facility, instead “mistakenly” sending him to the segregated housing unit. In another example, MDC failed to transport an inmate for surgery to repair his cheek. Because of the delays, the defendant was told that his cheek would have to be re-broken before surgery because it had healed improperly.

Critical mental health treatment is also nonexistent. In 2020, Jamel Floyd, an inmate who was placed in solitary confinement despite his known “bipolar disorder and schizophrenia,” died after being pepper sprayed during a manic episode.

Judge Furman cites MDC’s hazardous physical conditions as problematic. Notoriously, MDC suffered a week-long power outage in the winter of 2019 during a historically unprecedented polar vortex, leaving inmates in dark, freezing cells without necessities like electricity, heating, hot water, and functioning toilets.

When the lights turned back on, Southern District Judge Torres held a hearing at MDC, where she witnessed “abundant water damage” and “black blotchy mold.” Judge Torres spoke with inmates who informed her of their disturbing realities– one inmate felt as though he was “sleeping under a waterfall” with water pouring from the ceiling into his bed any time it rained or snowed and had to “literally take the noose off his cellmate’s hand” as he was trying to kill himself. Another inmate showed her the dressing on a gunshot wound had not been changed for so long that he was beginning to have “flashes in [his] eyes.” A third inmate informed her of how a corrections officer said that a bleeding rash was “above [his] pay grade.” 

Such stories are in no way unique to 2019— the problems persist. 

In 2021, the MDC carried out “planned maintenance” on the electrical system by enforcing a lockdown for four nights with no power and no water during which inmates’ toilets were reportedly overflowing and inmates “were sitting with water on the floor of their cell in the dark with feces on it.” 

In November 2023, the Court learned that most emergency call buttons in the facility’s main building do not work, despite being the only way (aside from yelling and banging) to call an officer during lockdown emergencies. 

Judge Furman’s decision concurs with at least two other judges in the Southern District Court of New York. In United States v. Boyd, Judge Stein extended the bail of another defendant in a similar situation under § 3145(c), citing the MDC’s “staffing issues, quarantines due to COVID-19, and lockdowns.”

In May 2023, Judge Engelmayer continued a defendant’s bail under § 3145(c) in consideration of the MDC’s continuing “unacceptable,” “inhospitable, [and] terrible” conditions — even though “[t]he pandemic is now on the wane.” Judge Engelmayer concluded:

“until the . . . Bureau of Prisons really can get its act together, . . . where a defendant is not a risk of flight, is not a danger to the community, and there aren’t special reasons for them to be remanded, avoiding putting a defendant in conditions like that qualifies as an exceptional reason under 3145(c).”

The conditions at MDC affect all detainees and require broad policy changes. Until those changes are made, judges in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York should follow Judge Furman’s lead and exercise their discretion aggressively by limiting the unnecessary suffering of defendants on a case-by-case basis.

Emily Furman, a 2023 graduate of Hamilton College, is a bilingual paralegal specialist at ZMO Law PLLC. She is not related to Judge Jesse Furman.