Nicolás Maduro, the deposed Venezuelan president, and his wife Cilia Flores are being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, New York, following their capture by US forces. The facility is known for housing high-profile defendants, including Luigi Mangione, who faces charges in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Sam Bankman-Fried.
Defence lawyers have repeatedly condemned conditions at the MDC as unsafe and inhumane. In a letter following Combs’ arrest, his attorneys cited an inmate killed in summer 2024 and at least four suicides in three years, along with ‘food contamination and hazardous physical conditions’. The jail has been described as ‘dirty’ and ‘infested with drugs’.
Federal judges have refused to send certain defendants to the MDC due to its conditions. In January 2024, Judge Jesse Furman declined to remand a compliant defendant, noting the jail’s ‘near perpetual lockdowns’. Maxwell’s lawyers argued that guards shone lights into her cell every 15 minutes. A 2019 power outage left inmates without heat for a week during a polar vortex.
Judges routinely grant reduced sentences based on MDC conditions, with prosecutors no longer disputing the unacceptable state of affairs. The facility houses 1,336 inmates and suffers from overcrowding and staff shortages, exacerbated by the closure of Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center in 2021. Officials have described management as ‘run by morons’, with wardens cycling through every few months. The Federal Bureau of Prisons claims conditions have improved since January.
