I don’t know why the overwhelming majority of journalists I talked with over the years never published serious investigations into MCC. Perhaps racialized assumptions played a role, separating victims of government abuse whose situations seemed urgent and worthy of months of painstaking research from those who are assumed to pose exceptional danger and thus perhaps deserve extreme measures. I was highlighting the inhumane conditions that largely unknown Muslims facing terrorism charges were experiencing at MCC. Now they are calling me about the über-rich, white Jeffrey Epstein.

Or perhaps it was the simple incongruity of the U.S. government running a high-rise dungeon in Manhattan’s financial district, which featured conditions more commonly associated with the jails of foreign dictatorships. The descriptions of the dirty, decrepit, vermin-infested, hyper-isolating jail sitting in an elite zip code never seemed to stick.

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.

First the basics: MCC is a pretrial federal facility run by the Bureau of Prisons, which is part of the Department of Justice and overseen by Congress, that holds people awaiting trial on charges in the Southern District of New York. This means that the people it holds are presumed innocent, and the law ostensibly prohibits their punishment before conviction. Opened in 1975, MCC today houses about 750 people in a facility built for fewer than 500. The conditions of their confinement vary widely, depending on where they are held, from the general population to the Special Housing Unit on the ninth floor to the fearsome 10 South wing. The SHU is for people the jail deems not safe in general population or who have allegedly broken jail rules; it features much more restrictive conditions, including solitary confinement. Epstein began in the general population, but was reportedly in the SHU on 9 South when he died.

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Lawyers and people held there awaiting trial regularly report appalling conditions. The temperature is not adequately regulated; the facility is often sweltering in the summer and so cold in the winter that prisoners report having trouble thinking and wearing layers of clothes to be able to sleep. A single psychiatrist serves both MCC and the Metropolitan Detention Center, another federal facility located in Brooklyn. People report being “treated” through the slat in their cell door. The facility is run-down, and the plumbing and elevators break often.

The most inhumane section of MCC is 10 South. The majority of the people held there over the past two decades have been Muslims facing terrorism charges; Guzman was held there as well. No outdoor recreation is allowed for 10 South prisoners, and windows are frosted so they are cut off from natural air and light. Besides the filth and vermin (even cell-cleaning supplies are often denied), one chief complaint is the lack of ventilation. On 10 South, prisoners are alone in their cells almost all of the time; they even shower there. Their sole escape is the hour when they are moved to a solitary cage for exercise. Sometimes, that recreation is denied, leaving prisoners to go days without leaving their cells. Cells are electronically surveilled, so that every action—including using the toilet, showering, and talking—is monitored.