The New York Metropolitan Detention Center, the federal prison in New York where Nicolás Maduro is incarcerated, is one of the city’s most notorious prisons along with Rikers and has been the subject of complaints about understaffing, crime in its facilities and harsh living conditions in the cells.
Located in the Brooklyn neighborhood, it has housed detainees such as Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs and former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández.
At New York’s federal prison alone, about 1,200 inmates have been awaiting trial in federal courts since the closure of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan.
Former Mexican Public Security Secretary Genaro García Luna said in a letter released by his lawyer that he witnessed homicides and stabbings. British Ghislaine Maxwell, partner and accomplice of the now deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, denounced the “inhumane, cruel and degrading” conditions at the MDC and compared her cell to that of the psychopath Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs”.
Luigi Mangione joined the long list of “famous” people in 2024 accused of the murder of the executive director of the UnitedHealthcare insurance company, which coincided with rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Former adviser to President Donald Trump, Michael Cohen, was also incarcerated at these facilities in 2020, accused of, among other things, tax evasion, and recalled his time in prison during Combs’s stay there. “Combs wakes up in a steel bed with a one-and-a-half-inch mattress, no pillow, in an eight-by-ten-foot cell that, I can assure you, is disgusting,” the former Trump adviser said, adding that during the first stage of the lockdown there was no access to books.
Currently, the alleged leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García, is another of the prisoners held at the facility awaiting trial for murder and drug trafficking.
Seven days without electricity with temperatures below zero
In 2019, the situation at the federal prison sparked protests after seven days partially without electricity and heat. According to videos posted on social media, many inmates asked for help by hitting the windows with objects after several days when the thermometer in New York reached fifteen degrees below zero. In addition, the prisoners’ lawyers denounced the lack of medical services.
The 2019 incident prompted a Justice Department investigation to assess whether the Bureau of Prisons had “adequate contingency plans” to address inmates’ living conditions.
For their part, the prisoners filed a class-action lawsuit, which resulted in 1,600 inmates being compensated approximately ten million dollars for enduring cold and inhumane conditions due to the power outage.
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