Check In #2: Prisoner’s Rights at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center

In seeking out data on the topic of prisoners’ rights that is specifically limited to the Metropolitan Detention Center, the main sources I’ve been able to find are archived new articles and Department of Justice Inspector General reports that relate to incidents at the prison at different times. The Inspector General reports are themselves analyses of information their office collected through interviews, video footage, and other primary sources, but any of this original material is impossible to find outside of these reports. For the most recent
incident, I’ve found the direct minutes of one court hearing that reveals a number of issues at the prison, but for previous casesthere’s a lack of easily accessible information. Ideally my goal would be to create a consistent timeline of incidents of abuse and misconduct at the prison, and document the various responses to it, but there are only a handful of cases that are well documented, depending on if they were deemed significant enough to report on by the news media or significant enough to investigate by the Office of the Inspector General. I also have two accounts of visits to the prison by judges that report similar violations of prisoners’ rights at different times, but my suspicion is that much of the misconduct goes unnoticed and unreported outside of major scandals that break through the general suppression of information by The Bureau of Prisons about what goes on inside the MDC. Another important type of data that is difficult to find is past statements by the prison’s officials or the Bureau of Prisons about previous incidents. These statements are well documented by news media around the 2019 power outage incident but for any other cases there is no record of what, if anything, was said in response by officials.

My goal with this project is still to answer the question of whether a separate third party should police federal prisons such as the MDC. In order to suggest that the answer is yes, I need to provide enough evidence that the current system of investigation by the Justice Department as well as the occasional indictments of prison guards in abuse cases has been ineffective in changing an ongoing pattern of abuse at the prison. Hopefully I can find some more consistent sources of data that would suggest such a patttern to fill in the gaps between the disparate sources I’ve found so far.