USA: why the justice department can’t be trusted to investigate abysmal conditions in federal prisons

The humanitarian crisis at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center will have come as a shock to many. It is horrifying. If there is one institution, however, which has no grounds for shock, nor the performance of it, it is the Justice Department.

As a late-January polar vortex hit New York with frigid temperatures, the Metropolitan Detention Center, a waterfront federal prison, experienced an electrical fire, leaving incarcerated people inside without heat, light, warm food, or access to legal counsel for days. Following a furious response from protesters and legal advocates, public officials and a federal judge toured the facility, witnessing inhumane conditions far beyond the temporary and harrowing loss of heat and power.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department, which oversees all federal prisons and jails through the Bureau of Prisons, announced that it has asked an internal watchdog to investigate the Metropolitan Detention Center’s response to the electrical fire and heating failure, as well as broader infrastructural problems. That is to say: After the very public revelation of torturous neglect and brutality in New York City’s largest federal detention facility, the Justice Department is going to investigate itself.

To have faith that such an investigation will lead to significant change, one would have to believe that recent events and conditions at Metropolitan Detention Center are anomalous in the facility and the broader prison system. They are not.

Abuse, misconduct, and neglect have consistently been found to pervade federal prisons — and the entire carceral system — with internal investigations by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General often leading to little more than recommendations, window dressing reform, and the flimsy appearance of accountability.

“Department of Justice attorneys, who represent the Bureau of Prisons, cannot be trusted to provide accurate information about the conditions at MDC Brooklyn, or to investigate the Bureau of Prisons,” said New York-based civil rights lawyer Gideon Oliver, who assisted the legal counsel in hearings this week for two people incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center.

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