The Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York.
Marti Licon-Vitale, the warden of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, which once housed pedophile mogul Jeffrey Epstein, abruptly left his post last week.
Likon-Vitale, 54, was transferred to the prison in January 2020 to overhaul it. Recently, the Prison Service said in a statement that Likon-Vitale “has announced his retirement and has appointed an interim prison director until a new director is appointed.”
The prison has now appointed an interim warden, Eric Williams, who is the fourth warden at the prison in 18 months and the third in charge since Epstein’s death by suicide in August 2019.
The Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York is one of the nation’s high-security prisons, housing more than 600 inmates. Epstein died inside the prison a month after his arrest in a child trafficking sex scandal, dying by suicide. Following his death, the then-prison director was temporarily reassigned, and there have been frequent changes in the prison’s warden since then.
The U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General has not yet completed its investigation into Epstein’s death, nor has it released the reasons for the sudden removal of special (suicide) surveillance on Epstein 12 days before the incident. The two correctional officers who were in charge of monitoring Epstein on the night of his death are awaiting trial on charges that they lied in prison records because they were sleeping and browsing the Internet at the Time of Epstein’s death.
The outgoing Licon Vitale faced enormous challenges during her tenure as she tried to turn things around, but encountered many difficulties, including a plague pandemic, smuggling and smuggling, and a shortage of personnel and sanitary protection materials in the early days of the pandemic. The week before leaving, a mentally challenged inmate, whose attorney said he had the mental capacity of an 8-year-old, was trapped in a holding cell for up to 24 hours awaiting a competency evaluation, in violation of prison rules.
The man trapped in the holding cell is Richard Quinn, 26 years old. His attorney, Peter Brill, said Quinn had to “make friends with rats” while he was stuck in the cell waiting in agony. He said senior prison officials failed to report the violation to the Bureau of Prisons.
In the past few weeks, a prison staff member also reported sexual harassment by a supervisor, but prison officials failed to report it to senior prison officials in a timely manner, according to the report.
In a statement, the Bureau of Prisons said, “The prison is committed to ensuring that all inmates, staff and the public are safe and treated humanely. Allegations of staff misconduct are being thoroughly investigated and, if true, appropriate action will be taken, including the possibility of appropriate criminal prosecution.”
The prison said its employees are required to avoid harassing behavior and “have received training to detect and prevent inappropriate behavior with other employees and with inmates.”
Last March, there were reports that weapons may have been smuggled into the prison. A week-long lockdown of the prison followed, and investigators found a handgun and several other contraband items, such as cell phones, drugs and homemade weapons, prompting an ongoing criminal investigation into guard misconduct.
The prison was missing more than 25 percent of its staff during the early stages of the plague outbreak.
Last May, court-mandated inspections found that inmates with symptoms of the CCA virus (coronavirus) were being ignored with little social distance, and some inmates were sleeping in bunks within reach of each other.
However, despite the complaints, only one inmate and 13 staff members at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York have so far contracted the CCP virus (Wuhan pneumonia), and no one has yet died in prison from the virus, according to the Bureau of Prisons.
In April 2020, one of Epstein’s former cellmates was transferred out of prison after testing positive for the virus, and in January of this year, the man was alleged to have died in his mother’s apartment.
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