Where human decency goes to die

The feds abruptly announced the other day that they’d be closing, at least for now, the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a moldy, roach-infested dump at the edge of Manhattan’s Chinatown that time forgot and Manhattanites ignored for decades before Jeffrey Epstein succeeded in his second attempt at killing himself there.

The warden was transferred out after that mess, as visits were abruptly ended and the jail slowly hollowed out from a badly overstuffed 700 inmates to under 250, most of them awaiting trial and the rest serving short sentences. They may now get transferred to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where Epstein’s alleged procurer Ghislaine Maxwell is awaiting trial while complaining bitterly about raw sewage flooding her cell and other atrocious conditions. (The winter before last, before she’d arrived, there was no heat).

Both of the city’s federal jails, a judge recently wrote, have “disgusting, inhuman conditions” that can only be explained by the fact that they are “run by morons.”

When MCC, the lockup that came to be known as “the Guantanamo of New York,” opened in 1975, it was hailed as one of the new “space age,” “ultra-modern” high-rise jails complete with central air conditioning, no bars on the cells and carpeted corridors. “People Will Be Trying To Break Into Jail,” read one headline.

As it happens, my friend Alex Brook Lynn’s entrepreneurial old man — who’s now a personal trainer and before that owned Manhattan institutions Burritoville, Veg-City Diner and Coney Island High — celebrated his 30th birthday while serving a four-month “skid bid” inside the newly opened MCC in 1976 after he was caught selling 100 pounds of weed before moving up to (and then serving real time for) smuggling in 100,000 pounds from Thailand.

Back in the day, he recalled in his distinctive gravel, MCC was “the most liberal prison in the world,” with bands brought in to play at Friday night socials with the women’s ward, a fenced-in roof deck with basketball and handball courts, and rec rooms with “pool tables, TVs (and) the first microwave I ever saw.”

But by the time occasional News scribe William Mersey spent 10 months there in 2019, including bunking with Paul Manafort and then serving as a companion to Epstein after his first suicide attempt, all of that was long gone inside of a mouse-infested “s—hole” full of broken cameras, snoozing guards and easier access to drugs than on the outside.

Mersey — who was serving his own short sentence for tax fraud related to his old business posting sex ads, and who believes it was experiencing MCC that drove Epstein to take his own life — was hardly the only one saying that. After Epstein’s first suicide attempt, jail sources suggested he hadn’t really tried to do himself in but instead that the cellmate who’d helped saved him, a muscle-bound ex-cop still awaiting trial for allegedly murdering four people during a drug deal, had been responsible for whatever actually happened. (Conveniently, the jail said the tapes that should have answered that had been accidentally erased.) Maybe not incidentally, the ex-cop had been feuding with the MCC about broken toilets, rodents and the otherwise appalling environment.

None of this, of course, is unique to federal jails. The year before MCC opened, a judge had ordered the city to close the infamous “Tombs” in lower Manhattan. Its inmates, many of whom petitioned to stay, were nonetheless moved to Rikers Island where things were about as dismal but both court trips and visits were much more difficult.

By all accounts, things at Rikers are even worse now. The News’ Graham Rayman just reported that there’s brutal heat and almost no water and that the prisoners effectively helping to run the place feel sorry for the exhausted and overwhelmed guards frequently assigned to 24-hour shifts there. A new report days later from the openly disgusted federal monitor overseeing the city jail painted a similarly ugly picture.

Rikers, too, is supposed to be shut down in a few years under a plan hashed out by the City Council and outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio (who’s shrugged about what’s happening at Rikers on his watch, claiming there’s not much he can do when “the whole culture of the Department of Correction needs a lot of change”), but that’s been delayed by the coronavirus and depends on smaller new jails opening in the boroughs, where several of them face fierce resistance.

Whatever happens at Rikers and any new jails that go up on Eric Adams’ watch, it comes down to whether or not people walking free care about what’s happening to those who are imprisoned past smirking when some celebrity lowlife like Epstein or Maxwell or Michael Avenatti complains, only to forget about it and all the other people, much less likely to be white, locked up with them.

You can build a better jail, but unless people give a damn they all end up as the same s—thole.