Andrew Dalack
speaker
33 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Andrew Dalack’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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Well, first, Anushka, I want to thank you and the BBC for taking an interest in the conditions at MVC Brooklyn, because it is an important issue of significant public interest. Anybody who has a loved one detained in that facility, that they deeply care about their well-being and their safety there, and they have good reason to. It is as bad of a place as people say it is.
But the crux of the issue really is a completion of, I think, three factors that sort of work together to create a perfect storm. The first is chronic understaffing. So the jail is routinely operating anywhere from two-thirds to 75% sort of capacity at best at any given point. The second is overcrowdedness. There's just too many people there to begin with.
And then the third is a certain bureaucratic intransigence. So there are just there just does not appear to be a meaningful political will to do anything about the situation in MVC Brooklyn. And that's why we're trying to seize upon opportunities like this when it seems like the public takes a
a particular interest in the conditions there because there are certain high-profile individuals detained there. And we're happy that's the case, but it shouldn't be that people should care about the conditions of a particular facility because the people who are housed there are popular or have sort of public stature. Everybody's life matters equally in this regard.
And so it's really important that the public knows what's happening there.
MVC Brooklyn is divided into two separate buildings. There's a West building and there's an East building.
What happens, especially in the West building, is that if there's a problem in a particular unit, let's say there's a fight, let's say there's an argument or some sort of a dispute between a staff member and a detainee, the facility's knee-jerk reaction is to lock the whole unit down and sometimes to lock the whole facility down. And that's in large part because it's understaffed.
If something goes wrong or something happens, they need to marshal a number of staff members to a particular floor. Well, that means that they necessarily have to lock everything else down. And what do we mean by a lockdown? These lockdowns are akin to solitary confinement. People are relegated to their cells for 23, 24 hours a day for an interminable period of time.
They're denied access to showers. They're denied access to hot food. They're denied access to the telephone to speak with their loved ones. It's much more difficult for them to meet with their attorneys in any sort of like an expeditious fashion. It puts a tremendous amount of strain on people.
And that's just notwithstanding the psychological impact of being confined to a very tiny cell with another person for days at a time. In addition to the psychological impact of being locked in on a regular basis, our clients routinely complain about inadequate amounts of food that oftentimes is inedible. People routinely complain of inadequate access to recreation.
So I have clients there who throughout their entire time at MVC Brooklyn never saw the sun. You know, never were allowed to go outside and be able to just breathe fresh air. There's also the issue of safety.
So when there's a dispute or when there's a problem between, you know, detainees, and you can obviously imagine how being locked up for interminable periods of time only enhances the stress level and enhances the tension. When that tension culminates in some sort of a fight, there's contraband rampant in that facility.
And there's homemade weapons that are, you know, created out of pieces of metal and other sort of makeshift items that a lot of different detainees have available to them. And so when there's a fight or when there's some sort of other conflict, it can escalate. And when it escalates, people get hurt, people get stabbed.
And it's a very sort of volatile environment that is a terribly scary place to be.
Yes, so Gustavo Chavez is my client. He was charged with drug offense in the federal system, sort of receiving a package in the mail containing drugs. So whether you're convicted after trial or convicted because you've pled guilty to certain kinds of drug offenses, the law says you have to go to jail before you're ultimately sentenced by the judge.
In Mr. Chavez's case, he did in fact plead guilty to one of those drug offenses that ordinarily required him to be remanded to jail pending sentencing. But Mr. Chavez presented with some challenges. He's an older man. He has health issues.
I made an argument to Judge Jesse Furman that it would be cruel and completely unnecessary to put someone like Mr. Chavez in particular at NBC Brooklyn, given all the problems in the facility, which are also compounded by something that I failed to mention before, which is a lack of adequate medical care and attention.
Well, to Judge Furman's credit, he not only engaged with my argument, acknowledging that other judges in the district had, in individual cases, concluded that the decrepit conditions at MVC Brooklyn warranted keeping people out on bail, he wrote a very well-reasoned decision and went through a sort of litany of problems that has plagued the MVC for years, again, primarily driven by understaffing, to say, look, there is some real merit to what
I was arguing that the conditions at MVC Brooklyn are so terrible that that no judge in the eastern or southern districts of New York can can be confident that in putting somebody there, they're putting them into a safe environment. He decided that that was an exceptional reason in and of itself.
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