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Jeffrey Epstein jail ‘a gulag’ in lower Manhattan¶
12 August 2019¶
Jeffrey Epstein death¶
Questions are being asked how Jeffrey Epstein died in custody in New York while being held on sex trafficking charges. So what is the detention facility like where he spent his final days?¶
Built in 1975, the 12-story Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan - where the financier died in a suspected suicide on Friday night - holds around 800 people awaiting trial or sentencing at the federal court house just a few blocks away.¶
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The brick building has detained such high-profile criminals as Mexican drug kingpin El Chapo, Gambino mafia crime boss John Gotti and World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef.¶
Like other federal prisons, the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) suffers from shortages of staff and resources, prisoner overcrowding and is plagued by violence and poor sanitary conditions.¶
The conditions¶
The jail was built to accommodate 474 inmates, but held 763 male prisoners at the time of Epstein’s death, according to a statement from the Federal Bureau of Prisons.¶
Prisoners have described seeing large rats in their cells, air conditioner units so noisy it is impossible to sleep, and absence of any natural light or sanitary water.¶
As he was sent down for the rest of his life, Mexican drug cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán took the opportunity to call the place “torture”.¶
“Since the government will send me to a jail where my name will not ever be heard again, I take this opportunity to say there was no justice here,” he said at his sentencing in July.¶
“It has been psychological and mental torture 24 hours a day.”¶
Brooklyn College professor Jeanne Theoharis, who has written extensively about MCC, told the Gothamist website in June that the jail resembles conditions found in countries such as “Iran or Russia”.¶
Calling the place a “gulag”, she described conditions as “filthy, freezing, no natural light, isolation so extreme that you’re punished for speaking through the walls, absurd rules like prisoners not getting to see the newspapers unless they’re 30 days old, secrecy so deep that people are force-fed”.¶
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Lawyer Andrew Laufer, who is suing the US government after his client was beaten to death in MCC in 2015, says the Riker’s Island prison, which is run by the city, is much more violent than MCC.¶
He says it’s too early to know whether Epstein’s wealth may have played a role in his death, amid speculation in the US that he could have bribed guards to be left alone.¶
He notes that other ultra-rich white collar criminals from Wall Street, only blocks away, are frequent guests of MCC, including Bernie Madoff who was arrested in 2008 for running a multi-million dollar Ponzi scheme.¶
Mr Laufer says that more important than a client’s profile or means is the crime itself and the publicity it receives in the media. Sex criminals like Epstein, h¶
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