In its immediate aftermath, Jeffrey Epstein’s 2019 death at the Metropolitan Correctional Center caused a flood of suspicion and likely some sighs of relief. In the weeks to follow, it led to criminal charges for the two guards on duty when it happened and an investigation by the Justice Department. Authorities said Epstein died by suicide, a conclusion which, even in the instances when it was accepted, didn’t quell the questioning. The Bureau of Prisons, which administers federal jails like the Metropolitan Correctional Center, has never been an emblem of soundness. But how, the House Judiciary Committee still wanted to know, could the world’s most notorious sexual predator have hanged himself in federal custody?
Two years later, the Justice Department investigation continues, with the two guards recently avoiding jail time by agreeing to cooperate. During an April hearing unrelated to Epstein, the federal judge Colleen McMahon described the Metropolitan Correctional Center and another federal jail in New York City as “run by morons.” But in the telling of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s death is not only an ongoing embarrassment for the Bureau of Prisons, but the cause of the inhumane conditions she says the same agency is currently keeping her under. Following her arrest in July on charges related to her alleged grooming of girls for Epstein’s sexual abuse, Maxwell has been held without bail in the Metropolitan Detention Center’s special housing unit, separate from the general prison population. In March, prosecutors added counts of sex trafficking conspiracy and sex trafficking of a minor.
Maxwell has pleaded not guilty to all the charges, and her lawyers have argued that what then attorney general William Barr called “a perfect storm of screw-ups” has made the Bureau of Prisons overzealous to save face. In a persistent spray of court filings and comments to news outlets, they have claimed their client is not suicidal, and that the detention center has only treated her as if she were on account of Epstein’s death at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. They accuse the agency of excessive searches of her body, serving her dirty water and inedible food, letting raw sewage flood her cell, and allowing guards to seize her confidential legal documents. The conditions have contributed to Maxwell’s hair and weight loss, they say, and have left her unable to adequately prepare for her trial, currently scheduled to begin on November 29.
The Bureau of Prisons has stood by the jail’s conduct at each turn, describing Maxwell’s treatment as the norm and noting in one court filing that “the defendant had not cleaned her cell in some time, causing the cell to become increasingly dirty.” Later, in April, Maxwell’s lawyer Bobbi Sternheim released the first photo of her client since Maxwell’s arrest, with a bruise over her left eye, and wrote in a filing that while Maxwell was unaware of its cause, the injury may have been related to a need to shield her eyes from the lights shone into her cell throughout the night. (A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons said that for “safety and security reasons” the agency “does not provide information about conditions of confinement or internal security practices for any particular inmate.”)
Maxwell’s brother Ian has recently taken to speaking out about American prison conditions. Over the course of a media campaign in the U.S. and U.K., Maxwell said his sister’s treatment in the Metropolitan Detention Center “amounts to torture” and has appeared to try to position her fight as social advocacy. “She has an opportunity to try to use her name and her case to try and improve conditions,” he told The Washington Post. “That’s what she definitely wants to do.” In support of the cause, Maxwell’s family launched a website, realghislaine.com, that features testimonials about his sister’s character as well as links to information about the harms of pretrial detention.
The maneuver has the ring of another wealthy recent convert who became interested in prison reform once the issue had affected his own family. Real estate scion and former presidential adviser Jared Kushner became something of an advocate after his father was convicted of witness tampering, tax evasion, and illegal campaign contributions. When his father-in-law, Donald Trump, was in office, Kushner championed the First Step Act, which, while aimed at reducing the federal prison population, garnered some skeptical reactions about his involvement.
“I think, once anything starts to impact folks who are not just Black and brown, then you get this sort of bipartisanship,” Angel Gregorio, a Washington, D.C., spice shop owner with two brothers incarcerated in federal jails, told PBS shortly after the law’s passage. “You know, like, now that you have so many white people who are being locked up for these drug offenses, it’s like, okay, we need to do something about this.”
The allegedly torturous conditions she’s been subjected to have not elicited much sympathy for Maxwell, and the Metropolitan Detention Center has faced little scrutiny over the conflict. “The media treats it as the whining of some privileged person,” the federal defense attorney Joshua Dratel said in an interview, approximating the general tone of news coverage: “‘She doesn’t like it because she can’t get a manicure.’”
Tabloids have reliably played Maxwell’s suffering for glee, with court filings about her clothes and hair replenishing the fodder. One lawyer who works with indigent federal defendants, requesting anonymity to speak about a case they’re not involved with, expressed mixed feelings about the publicity that comes with inmates like Epstein and Maxwell: “If they are really high-profile, unliked people, do these very serious issues get the back of the hand?”
All the while, the lawyer David Boies, who represents some of Epstein’s victims, told reporters outside a federal courthouse in April that the media blitz surrounding Maxwell’s prison conditions isn’t fair to those he called the real victims.
Maxwell’s claims about her conditions appear to stand little chance of winning her bail. Her fifth application was recently denied. But the argument has yielded more sustained attention than her other legal appeals. She has also claimed that her first indictment is illegitimate on the basis that it was delivered in a suburb that is less diverse than her trial location in Manhattan, and that she hasn’t been treated as well as famous male defendants like Harvey Weinstein and John Gotti.
The Metropolitan Correctional Center and Metropolitan Detention Center each occupy a curious intersection of recognition. They have attracted coverage for the prominent defendants they have held, including Sinaloa cartel kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán at the former and NXIVM cult leader Keith Raniere at the latter in recent years. That they are both pretrial facilities has not appeared to mitigate their harshness, and almost a decade before Epstein prompted fresh attention toward conditions at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, Amnesty International wrote an open letter to former attorney general Eric Holder saying that the facility’s special housing unit didn’t meet international standards for humane treatment. On the other hand, the two jails sit somewhat inconspicuously among New York City streets. Neither the Metropolitan Correctional Center, which is tucked into the financial district, nor the Metropolitan Detention Center, which sits near various warehouses and a new shopping center in Sunset Park, has drawn the same level of infamy as other New York prisons such as Rikers Island.
“The descriptions of the dirty, decrepit, vermin-infested, hyper-isolating jail sitting in an elite zip code never seemed to stick,” Brooklyn College political science professor Jeanne Theoharis wrote of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in The Atlantic in 2019. “The public attention to Epstein’s suicide could change that—but only if the public resists the seductive scandal of it all and insists on seeing the structural problems that Epstein’s time at MCC exposes.” In Maxwell’s case, as in Epstein’s, that suggestion has largely been ignored, and the grim spectacle of the matter has tended to eclipse any light it might shed on the Bureau of Prisons or the jails under its supervision.
Before Maxwell, one of the last times the Metropolitan Detention Center made such regular headlines was a power outage during a cold stretch of early 2019. Activists were not meant to find out about the blackout. “The information about the conditions was leaked through a contraband cell phone to a family member who then sounded the alarm,” Carmen Perez, the president of The Gathering for Justice, recalled in a recent interview. Protesters gathered outside the jail for days as people banged for help on the windows of their freezing cells. The demonstrations captured the attention of elected officials, who eventually toured the facility. The Justice Department announced that an internal watchdog would investigate conditions at the jail.
A few weeks later, Perez said, members of Justice League NYC, a division of The Gathering for Justice, and family members of people incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center took a bus to the Bureau of Prisons’ regional office in Philadelphia. Perez said that building security locked the door and wouldn’t let them in. According to Perez, local police arrived, and a representative for the Bureau of Prisons eventually accepted a signed letter that the family members had come to deliver. Months later, Perez said, the group’s contact at the agency departed, and the line of communication disappeared. (The Bureau of Prisons declined to comment on what it called “anecdotal allegations.”) Herman Quay, the warden overseeing the Metropolitan Detention Center at the time of the blackout, received a promotion. He now oversees three federal jails in Pennsylvania, according to The Intercept.
In interviews, several defense lawyers with experience dealing with the Bureau of Prisons emphasized the agency’s ability to avoid oversight. “Because it’s a federal prison, it’s very protected from lawsuits,” the attorney Katie Rosenfeld said. “It’s very hard to sue the federal government and federal prison system.” Rosenfeld represents the family of Jamel Floyd, a 35-year-old who died of a heart attack in custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center after correctional officers pepper-sprayed him in his cell last year. Dratel, the federal defense lawyer, said the Bureau of Prisons lurches from “one crisis to the next with outrage and very little action,” describing it as “among the least accountable agencies you could find.”
On the night of Epstein’s death at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, according to a 2019 indictment, the two guards on duty were allegedly shopping online, one for furniture and the other for motorcycles, and ostensibly napping at a desk near his cell, but indicated on prison records that they were keeping an eye on him. The indictment said that from around 10:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m., no one checked on Epstein, who was awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges and had already made one suicide attempt. When the guards went to bring him breakfast in the morning, they found he had hanged himself with a bedsheet.
Lawyers for the guards have suggested that their clients were being scapegoated. “We had hoped that the U.S. attorney’s office would make an effort to try to address the systematic failures with respect to the Bureau of Prisons,” Montell Figgins told The New York Times after the former Metropolitan Correctional Center guard Michael Thomas was arraigned. “They chose instead to indict Mr. Thomas.” The two guards were working overtime because of staffing shortages, reportedly a chronic issue across federal prisons—the Associated Press reported last month that almost a third of federal-correctional-officer jobs are vacant.
Shortly after Maxwell’s arrest, a crop of reports citing anonymous federal law enforcement officials detailed some of the precautions the Metropolitan Detention Center was taking to prevent her from self-harm, including dressing her in paper clothes and having her sleep on a bare mattress. The agency that had turned its eyes from Epstein appeared now to be centering its gaze on Maxwell. While this may have been good public optics after the Epstein debacle, the dynamic also became a readymade talking point for Maxwell. Outside a federal courthouse after her April arraignment, Maxwell’s lawyer David Markus complained to reporters that she was suffering from the “Epstein effect.”
The alleged severity of Maxwell’s treatment is no anomaly, defense attorneys say. “For her or any other defendant,” Dratel said, “it is that bad.” Over the last 16 months, reports have detailed how COVID-19 public health guidelines either haven’t been followed in jails or have exacerbated isolation. McMahon, the federal judge who recently criticized conditions at the Metropolitan Detention Center and Metropolitan Correctional Center, made her remarks after Tiffany Days, who has been held at both, gave a harrowing account of her detention. “The cell that they put me in MCC, the ventilation was totally broke,” Days said at her April sentencing for drug conspiracy. “I would cry myself to sleep, teeth chattering, thinking at times I would die.”
In some respects, Maxwell, who has the benefit of steady public recognition of her circumstances, has received better treatment than others at the jail. She and Raniere were reportedly among the first inmates granted in-person visits from their lawyers when COVID-19 restrictions began to lift last year. Under healthier circumstances, Epstein and Maxwell’s Bureau of Prisons involvement might be incidental to the issue. As the New York Daily News noted in April, a Metropolitan Correctional Center inmate awaiting sentencing suggested as much in a recent court filing. “When inmate Epstein committed suicide, attention was shined on the MCC by everyone. Administrative officials were shuffled around or fired,” Maurice Washington wrote. “It’s a shame that something I and countless other inmates have been screaming about for years only gets attention when a billionaire, accused sexual predator is party to it.”
Jamel Floyd, the 35-year-old who guards pepper-sprayed at the Metropolitan Detention Center, died just over a week after Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. Black Lives Matter protests surrounded the jail, but the death didn’t produce any congressional inquiry. Andrew Laufer, a lawyer for the family of Roberto Grant, who died in Metropolitan Correctional Center custody in 2015, pointed to a similar lack of attention for what experts told Gothamist in April was a homicide. Epstein is “someone of their cut,” Laufer said of Congress’s interest in a white, affluent financier’s death. “If it happened to him it could happen to them. That could be the self-preservation, lizard-brain aspect of it.”
In April, Maxwell’s lawyers asked for the third time that she be released on bail. The Second Circuit of Appeals denied the request, but during the hearing, a trio of judges didn’t sound entirely unmoved. Prosecutors described the Metropolitan Detention Center’s treatment of Maxwell as “routine.”
“Routine to shine lights into the eyes of every prisoner every 15 minutes during the night?” the federal judge Pierre Leval asked. “Are you really telling us that?”
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