PPEcel
cope and seethe
★★★★★
- Joined
- Oct 1, 2018
- Posts
- 29,087
From NPR:
The Federal Bureau of Prisons said the Metropolitan Correctional Center will be closed at least temporarily to address issues that have long plagued the facility, including lax security and crumbling infrastructure. The decision to close the MCC, which had been billed as one of the most secure jails in America comes weeks after Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco toured the jail and saw the conditions firsthand.
MCC New York primarily held federal criminal defendants awaiting trial in Manhattan, and consequently hosted a number of high-profile guests, including serial jailbait fiddler Jeffrey Epstein, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, manlet drug lord El Chapo, and 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef.
One of MCC New York's lesser-known former guests was Peter Bright, better known as "Dr. Pizza", a hate-filled incelophobic Redditor now serving a 12-year sentence for attempting to entice minors to perform illegal sexual acts. He resided in the MCC from his arrest in May 2019 to the end of his trial in November 2020.
In a court filing before Dr. Pizza's sentencing hearing last year, his lawyers wrote of his life at MCC New York:
Evidence from a doctor demonstrated that “individuals convicted of sex offenses involving minors, including possessors of child pornography, came to prison with a ‘bad label’ and were in for ‘a difficult time.’" Sadly, this has already been [Dr. Pizza]’s experience at the MCC. He had to change units on account of threats and harassment at the jail after individuals in his unit discovered the nature of his charge.
Dr. Pizza's parents also referenced the conditions at MCC in a letter to his judge:
Judge Castel, [Dr. Pizza] has been detained in a horrific place. The conditions at MCC are deplorable at the best of times. In addition to the unsanitary conditions and rodent and vermin infestation, now because of Covid 19, prisoners are locked up 22.5 hours a day. They are deprived of much needed physical contact with loved ones. I haven’t seen my son in 7 months. It breaks my heart not being able to hug him—I know he counts on his family’s love and support to keep him afloat and it just pains us to be so far apart.
MCC's poor conditions have been public knowledge for long. In 2017, the New York Times described MCC New York as "tougher than Guantanamo Bay".
“The segregated units are horrifying and inhumane,” David E. Patton, the executive director of Federal Defenders of New York, wrote by email. “If you wanted to intentionally design a place to drive people mad, you’d be hard pressed to do better.”
Judge Colleen McMahon (who coincidentally is the judge overseeing the case of incel YouTuber "Smooth Sanchez"), had this to say about the MCC earlier this year:
The single thing in the five years that I was chief judge of this court that made me the craziest was my complete and utter inability to do anything meaningful about the conditions at the MCC, especially at the MCC and the MDC, two federal correctional facilities located in the City of New York that are run by morons, which wardens cycle (through) repeatedly, never staying for longer than a few months or even a year.