Somebody Needs To Lose Their Job Behind This Brooklyn MDC Travesty

The heat is back on, and needs to be turned up on those responsible.

Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

According to reports, power has been restored to the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center. The heat is coming back. The nightmare for inmates — some of whom haven’t even been convicted of a crime, and none of whom deserved to housed in sub-human conditions — is passing. Their families, activists, and even some politicians made the world aware of the week-long travesty that unfolded at the prison, and those people have done the hard work of fixing the problem.

Now, we need to turn our pitchforks towards those responsible and make sure that they do not get away with it.

The AP reports that the Justice Department will be “looking into” what happened. From the AP:

The U.S. Department of Justice said Sunday it will work with the Bureau of Prisons to examine what happened at a federal detention center in Brooklyn that had lost heat and electricity last week and to ensure that it has a backup system in place.

“In the coming days, the Department will work with the Bureau of Prisons to examine what happened and ensure the facility has the power, heat and backup systems in place to prevent the problem from re-occurring,” said Wyn Hornbuckle, deputy director of public affairs for the Justice Department.

That’s not nearly good enough. Yes, it’s important to put policies in place to make sure that this never happens again. But it should have never happened in the first place. The people who allowed this to happen need to be fired. I don’t even think that they should be allowed to hide behind qualified immunity; if it were me, they’d end up in the very jail they callously abandoned to its fate.

Failing that, I don’t see how Acting Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Hugh J. Hurwitz, keeps his job. Consider the scope of the failure here. From Slate:

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According to the New York Times, which first reported on the outage, the prison’s troubles began on Jan. 5, when it lost power. The heating began to falter the week of Jan. 20 and continued through last week, when the cold became dangerous. The more than 1,600 inmates—a combination of high-profile criminals and a more low-risk mix of inmates with medical conditions and New Yorkers awaiting trial, according to the Times—huddled in their beds in the dark.

The Bureau of Prisons, which runs the facility, has denied that the heat had been so limited and said in the Sunday statement that inmates had had hot showers. Several lawmakers who toured the jail Saturday disagreed, having found temperatures as low as 49 degrees in the facility, and criticized the jail’s officials for not treating the situation with the urgency that it required. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Saturday night that the city’s emergency management agency had delivered generators, blankets, and hand warmers to the prison.

Somebody needs to hold these people responsible, and that is under the “best case scenario” where these failures were the result of incompetence and not spite.

But I think they were the result of spite too. Remember, federal corrections officers were not paid during the 35-day government shutdown. There were grumblings popping up over on the alt-right about how federal workers weren’t getting paid but prisoners were still being “fed.” Because the alt-right is the kind of place where they think that providing food to people you are holding against their will is some kind of discretionary luxury.

I don’t think that there was necessarily some warden character who ordered the Code Red and allowed these people to go without heat. But I do think that, a week after the shutdown, the people in charge were ill-disposed towards providing basic services to the inmates. As Liam Neeson just horrifyingly explained, “revenge” is a dangerous and incoherent motive.

A failure like this is not an “accident.” It’s not an act of God. It requires the bad intentions of evil men. Those responsible must be held accountable.

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Justice Department to probe federal jail in NYC [Associated Press]


Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.