Conditions at Brooklyn's Infamous MDC Prison (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: The current home of ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, has been widely described as hell on earth. As a former federal prosecutor in New York, I've been inside the MDC many times, and I can tell you that's true. Recent or current high-profile inmates at the MDC include Sean Diddy Combs, Ghislaine Maxwell, Luigi Mangione, R. Kelly, and former crypto-mogul Sam Bankman-Freed. Now, Nicolás Maduro, who just days ago lived in a presidential palace in Venezuela, is being held in one of the most notorious federal prisons in the United States ahead of his trial. The MDC is a massive building on the western edge of Brooklyn, just off the East River within sight of the Statue of Liberty. The MDC is currently the only federal correctional facility in all of New York City, and it has a history of overcrowding. It currently houses about 1,300 federal inmates. The facility is notorious for brutal conditions, poor sanitation, frequent power outages and losses of heat in winter, inadequate medical services. Two inmates were killed at the MDC in 2024, and in March 2025, DOJ charged MDC inmates and a prison guard with acts of violence and with running a contraband smuggling operation inside the prison. Federal judges have described conditions at the MDC as barbaric and contemptuous of human dignity. Some judges have refused to send people to the MDC, granting bail or reduced sentences because of conditions at the facility. A Bureau of Prisons spokesperson told CNN in 2024 that BOP had taken steps to increase staffing and to address hundreds of outstanding maintenance issues that had not been resolved. The official said that Bureau of Prisons would continue to work to improve conditions at the prison.