The troubled Metropolitan Detention Center jail in Brooklyn has just two doctors on staff to care for its more than 1,100 inmates, and an opening for a third physician has gone unfilled for nearly a decade.
That detail about the city’s only federal jail — which has long been plagued by delays in medical treatment, missed medical appointments, and botched cancer diagnoses — came out in a Brooklyn Federal Court hearing last week about why an inmate didn’t get all his antibiotics while in solitary, shedding more light on the horrific conditions at MDC that include a string of violent incidents and instances of medical mistreatment.
At the hearing Monday, MDC’s clinical director Dr. Bruce Bialor said he oversees a staff of about 20 or 30 inside the Sunset Park facility, and he couldn’t tell the judge running the hearing whether the federal Bureau of Prisons maintained a specific medical-staff-to-inmate ratio.
“We can always use more staff. I think any medical provider would say the same thing,” he said in response to a question by the inmate’s attorney, Noam Biale. “We’ve had an ongoing need for at least one more doctor for years. So we could probably use at least one or two more doctors.”
Another opening for a nurse practitioner has remained open for years, and the jail only started filling several open nurse positions over the past year, he testified.
The jail, which holds fallen hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs and alleged health care CEO killer Luigi Mangione, held 1,600 inmates at the beginning of 2024, though that number has dropped over the past year.
The lack of doctors persists despite efforts by the federal Bureau of Prisons to fill medical positions at the MDC. Last January, the jail had a single nurse on staff, according to a recent BOP report. As of September, it now has six.
Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall called for the hearing back in May, after an inmate who needed his appendix removed didn’t get his entire antibiotics regimen when he was tossed in the special housing unit — solitary confinement.
Bialor said didn’t he know whether the jail had a formal policy in place to make sure inmates in solitary get to keep their meds.
“That’s not my area of expertise, exactly how it happens from the time they go to SHU to make sure that they get their meds,” Bialor said. “I can’t tell you off the top of my head. I’m sorry.”
The inmate’s treatment is another in a series of problems at the MDC. In 2019, the jail lost power for eight days in the dead of winter, and in 2021, defense attorneys highlighted complaints of no water or hot food, spotty electricity and low staff levels.
In December, Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Dora Irizarry blasted the jail for defying her order to send an inmate with a severe contagious infection to a medical facility, and in January, Manhattan Federal Court Judge Jesse Furman ruled that conditions there were so bad they constituted “extraordinary reasons” to not lock up a 70-year-old convicted drug dealer awaiting sentencing.
