Metropolitan Correctional Centers

Federal Metropolitan Detention and Correctional Centers

While the designation “metropolitan correctional center” may suggest various urban jail and prison facilities operated by state and local jurisdictions, the term represents a specific category of correctional institution at the federal level. Metropolitan correctional centers and metropolitan detention centers are important components in the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons system of correctional institutions. There are presently three federal MCCs (in downtown Chicago, San Diego, and New York City) and a half-dozen MDCs (at Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, Honolulu, Seattle-Tacoma, and Philadelphia). Each of these institutions is located at the heart of a major city in close proximity to other government buildings.

The MCCs house both male and female inmates and are classified as administrative detention institutions. This means that they have special detention missions and can hold inmates of all four federal security classifications. In practice, the facilities generally hold most nontrustee inmates under high-security conditions, regardless of their individual classifications. All three metropolitan correctional centers were built in the mid-1970s during a period when corrections planners were experimenting with new approaches to the architecture and management of prison facilities.

Metropolitan detention centers are essentially federal jails. They are not appreciably distinct from the MCCs in their overall physical plants and operations, but they are designed to accomplish a more narrow set of correctional missions. Intended to provide short-term incarceration for approximately 500 federal pretrial detainees each, they are all beyond capacity today. Most are also classified as administrative and hold inmates of all federal security levels. Where MDCs exist, they displace the need of the U.S. Justice Department to lease cell space from city and county jails operated by local jurisdictions.

Architecture

Urban skylines have long been graced by correctional facilities, but the modern metropolitan detention centers are distinguishable by their deliberately unobtrusive, relatively attractive, noncorrectional appearance. In fact, most of the federal MCCs and MDCs could easily be mistaken for metropolitan office buildings, and some have won architectural awards for their designs. The centers have no visible razor wire fences, thick block structures, or corner guard towers. There are also no detectable prison bars and no obvious armed patrols circling the facilities. This last feature helps the institutions avoid the cagelike appearance of traditional prison structures. Entrances to the buildings exhibit no obvious indicia of high security, [Page 598]because transportation of inmates to and from them takes place in large underground sally-port parking driveways, where buses and vans pick up and drop off inmates.

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