They’re Closing the Prison Where I Met Jeffrey Epstein. It’s About Time.
It was a dark day in late December when my pretrial officer called to inform me I’d be serving my year in prison at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Manhattan. I was hoping for Danbury or Otisville, both much better places to do your bid. But I drew the deuce of clubs: MCC, a prison so bad that the Federal Bureau of Prisons has just decided to shut it down.
Upon discovering my designation, I looked up MCC online and immediately found an article describing the prison as the Guantanamo Bay of New York. Not a good sign. The reporter, and many ex-inmates, asserted that the prison was roach and rodent-infested. I live in the East Village of New York so I know about roaches and mice — but not in the size and numbers that I saw at MCC upon arrival.
Inmates’ entire stashes of pistachio nuts and cereal disintegrated in the middle of the night, so hungry and numerous were the mice. We’d wet and wad up toilet paper to stuff the holes in our lockers — all in a vain attempt at keeping the rodents away from our commissary food. This wasn’t one mouse at a time; whole families routinely skittered through my cell.