Jail a ‘cesspool’ Inmates to sue over cleanup with no safety gear

Feces and urine dripped onto prisoners in a ninth-floor housing unit in the Manhattan Detention Complex, forcing them to wear bags over their heads for two days in March whenever they used their telephone area.

A team of detainees was assigned to clean up the overflow from a toilet leak on the 10th floor above them — and they did so without protective gear, leading them to fear they might contract coronavirus from the fecal matter, an exinmate told the Daily News.

“We’re locked in this house with no air, no windows, no nothing, and then you tell me there’s a pandemic and then we got fecal matter and urine all over?” said Jeremiah

Browne, 41, who lived in unit 9E at the MDC, where the leak happened.

“Right now MDC is like a cesspool,” said Browne, who was released Saturday. “There’s nothing you can do. There’s no movement. There’s no reprieve.”

Twelve men who lived in the area plan to sue the Department of Correction over the stinky leak and for failing to provide them the protection they needed to clean up the fetid mess, which dripped for two days starting March 16.

After the drip began, inmates alerted the Correction Department, but no one came to clean it up, Browne said.

Instead, a crew of three detainees provided with gloves and mop buckets and plastic bags on their heads — but no masks — cleaned the mess.

The inmates cleaned the poop-stained telephones with alcohol wipes so detainees unable to have in-person visits with family and lawyers could make necessary calls, Browne said.

Two days after the leak began — after the detainees had already mopped up some of the stinking sewage without appropriate protective gear — the Correction Department provided the three-person cleaning crew with two hazmat suits, Browne said.

“The correction officers specifically told them that the masks were to be saved for employees and not inmates, even though the inmates were being forced to clean feces and urine,” reads the notice of claim filed on behalf of Browne and other prisoners with the city comptroller’s

’office.

Numerous inmates got sick in the days following the leak, reporting nausea, vomiting and chest pains to jail officials, Browne said. None of the inmates were immediately tested for coronavirus, the exprisoner said — but prison staff did give them Pepto Bismol.

“Even in a pandemic, and even while in jail, inmates should still be afforded basic human rights — such as protective gear while being forced to clean up feces. They are still human beings,” said Cary London, the lawyer representing the detainees.

Browne, who is asthmatic, was locked up on a parole violation — he had missed a curfew. A judge freed him amid the raging pandemic that threatens the city’s incarcerated population.