It was supposed to be temporary.
In December 2012, the Federal Bureau of Prisons decided to address overcrowding in men's prisons by taking women inmates out of the only federal prison for women in the Northeast, FCI Danbury, and move men in. The inmates were taken to a jail in Brooklyn but were told the move would only be for 18 months, until a new facility could be built for them in Danbury.
Three years later, over one hundred women are stuck in two windowless rooms in the Metropolitan Detention Center, in a high-rise near Green-Wood Cemetery. Twenty-four are part of the original group; the rest had been sentenced after the women's prison was closed.
Ramona Brant, 53, spent the first 19 years of a life sentence for a nonviolent drug conspiracy charge at Danbury, before she and the others were transferred to MDC in March 2014.
She was granted clemency by President Barack Obama last February, but recalls her time in Brooklyn vividly. "We felt like we were animals that was taken to a pound and then that was it," she said. "They just closed the door and left us."
[For more of this story, written by Alec Hamilton, go to http://www.wnyc.org/story/sent...prison-trapped-jail/]
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