Torture at NYC Federal Jails
Federal jails in New York City have been torture chambers for pretrial detainees since the outbreak of the pandemic last year, and indeed even before. At a recent sentencing hearing before former Chief Judge McMahon of the SDNY, the horrors of the MCC and MDC were laid stunningly bare. In a heartbreaking statement by defendant Tiffany Days, who was charged with a non-violent narcotics distribution crime, she described conditions of her pretrial confinement that were more reflective of medieval torture than modern decency. Judge McMahon agreed, finding the conditions at MCC Manhattan: “disgusting, inhuman as anything I’ve heard about at any Colombian prison,” “run by morons,” and holding that there is “no excuse for the conditions in [the MCC and MDC Brooklyn].” The judge concluded that Ms. Days “shouldn’t have to suffer for the incompetence of the United States Department of Justice and its subsidiary agency, the Bureau of Prisons.” However, because Ms. Days was charged with a drug crime that Congress deemed worthy of a mandatory minimum of 5 years in prison, Judge McMahon ruled that she “can’t give Ms. Days a just sentence… My hands are tied.” Ms. Days must remain in prison for over two more years.
At her sentencing hearing, held by videoconference, Ms. Days highlighted a litany of shocking and horrifying human rights abuses at MCC Manhattan. She also did so with heroic poise and eloquence, despite her ordeal. The sentencing transcript should be required reading for every federal judge, prosecutor and defense attorney in New York City: a clarion call for criminal justice reform now, and more specifically for federal bail reform similar to what recently has been enacted in New York City. Pretrial detention should be limited to those most egregious violent offenders, and that is all. To place people in prolonged periods of pretrial detention for non-violent offenses is to make a mockery of the “presumption of innocence.” Indeed, the Bail Reform Act of 1984 actually requires the release of most defendants on bail subject to “the least restrictive condition or combination of conditions.” However, we still have nearly two thousand pretrial detainees at our federal jails in New York who are charged with non-violent drug, immigration or even economic crimes. Today, these individuals, who are not even convicted of anything, are being held under conditions that, under Judge McMahon’s findings are “inhuman,” “disgusting,” and inexcusable for our society.
Sadly, the failures of our federal detention centers are not limited to the problems created by the pandemic. Ms. Days identified the horrors of the MCC well before the COVID-19 outbreak. In 2019, during the Jeffrey Epstein “investigation,” Ms. Days, a recent arrestee with no history of violence, was put in mandatory 23-hour lockdown, “unable to even make a phone call to speak to anyone.”
In February 2020, when a loaded firearm was found at the jail, Ms. Days reports they “were locked down for 14 days. In those 14 days we were given three showers, and that’s because we begged for them;” female inmates were given “no water cups” for their cells, “no sanitary napkins”; “girls that caught their period, were bleeding and had to sleep in garments and stay in their sheets, and were unable to use the laundry.”
When George Floyd was murdered, the MCC reacted: “[W]e were locked in for another ten days. We were not given showers again, no phone calls, no recreation, no commissary.”
To add to this tragedy, the MCC’s physical facility is crumbling. The sewage backed up in the female inmates’ unit, creating a “feces flood that [the inmates] were actually told to clean with their own hands. It was humiliating. Floating dead water bugs, mice, chunks of defecation coming out of the pipes and urine-filled water gushing all through the area.”
The heat has failed in these facilities for dangerously long periods of time. Ms. Days added: “I froze in a cell for seven-and-a-half months with no heat, sleeping with a hat, gloves, sweat pants and sweatshirts.”
She reported her cellmates “were mice. They would come out of large holes in the wall that were as big as tennis balls, jumping around, running around the cells.”
When COVID-19 struck the jail, the only response was to put inmates in long stretches of debilitating isolation. Ms. Days caught the virus in its first wave last Spring, and she “was put in a room, a [Segregated Housing Unit] that’s used for disciplinary [purposes], with no water, no medication, and I wasn’t seen for six days.” Ms. Days was not allowed to have a cup in her isolation cell to drink water; was fed through slits in her cell with “frozen boxes of baloney sandwiches . . . frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, lunch and dinner,” which were long past their posted package expiration dates.
She painfully recalled that “[t]he solitude of lockdown drove me insane, and came to the point that I started talking to myself and seeing shadows. … nobody cared … [no one] tried to help me.”
Judge McMahon concluded this painful proceeding by pronouncing more prison time for this woman, helplessly concluding: “Well, I wish I had done something that you could appreciate. That’s one of the great frustrations of my life. Good luck to you, ma’am.”
This is the state of the justice system in the largest city inAmerica in 2021… why are we not talking about this on every news outlet or social media platform? Why do we, as a society, not care? Tiffany Days – and the thousands like her – need to be heard now.