Something Else For Brooklyn Politicians To Aspire To

It’s a slow Friday in the political world, so given all the Brooklyn politicians who’ve found themselves in prosecutors’ crosshairs recently, we figured it would be a good day to tour the Brooklyn Detention Complex – the New York City Corrections Department’s jail in the heart of the borough’s downtown.

The jail is reopening for 759 prisoners next week after an eight-year shutdown, and Warden Walter Nin and other Corrections Department brass opened the cell doors to help make a good impression on their neighbors. A public open house aimed at nearby residents will be held Saturday.

“We are fully committed in the Department of Corrections to being good neighbors,” said Nin, who showed that inmates are physically unable to reach the opaque windows from which local myth holds they yell at passers-by. “You see it. There’s no way they could scream out the window.”

(Yes, we know federal prosecutors have been the ones putting most politicians in jail lately, so crooked pols are unlikely to see the inside of a city jail. But don’t let that stop you from picturing some likely suspect from City Hall or Albany settling into a 44-square-foot cell.)

The 55-year-old jail on Atlantic Avenue still features the cinder block and old iron of half a century ago, but it smells like paint and floor wax inside, and even the bars on the cells gleam. A sample cellblock was arrayed with the accoutrements every inmate can expect on arrival – sheets and a towel, a comb and toothbrush and toothpaste, shoes and a uniform. Razors are kept under lock and key.

Inmates can spend time in a common room most of the day, where they can watch TV and make phone calls. The first-floor visiting room has a huge mural of fish in a coral reef painted on one wall, and Superman, Batman and Spider-Man on another – not to taunt the caged prisoners with images of freedom, Nin said, but to appeal to the children who visit them.

Corrections closed the jail in 2003 to save money, spokeswoman Sharman Stein said, but is reopening it to clear space in dilapidated Rikers Island units that need to be torn down and replaced.

The Brooklyn Detention Complex – it’s no longer the Brooklyn House of Detention – will hold inmates awaiting trial in the courthouse across the street, which is connected by an underground tunnel.

That means they will no longer need to be bused back and forth from Rikers for every court date during their average stay of 56 days, and they will likely be closer to family members who can now visit them in jail more easily.

Of course, more jail visitors is exactly what residents in the rapidly-gentrifying Boerum Hill neighborhood don’t want, where gleaming new condos have sprouted in literally all directions around the jail.

Nin said the department will strive to process visitors through metal detectors and security checks quickly, so they won’t have to wait in line on the street. A corrections officer will be assigned to patrol the block the jail sits on around the clock, looking for trouble and stopping any problems.

But this being New York City, Nin said the concern he has heard most frequently from nearby residents isn’t about safety – it’s about parking. Everyone working there has been warned to take mass transit to work, he said, and no new parking placards will be issued to jail staff.

“Every man,” Nin said, “has to pay for his own spot.”