NEW YORK (NewsNation) — Ex-inmate Larry Levine, founder of Wall Street Prison Consultants, says Sean “Diddy” Combs is on suicide watch in prison.
Levine told NewsNation’s Ashleigh Banfield on Thursday that Diddy is unable to enter traditional prison housing because “somebody will take him out, for sure.”
“This guy thought he would have gone home. All of a sudden, he didn’t get bond. Reality has hit him, and I understand he has a shrink coming by his cell to see him several times a day,” Levine said on “Banfield.”
After being arrested Monday on federal sex trafficking and racketeering charges, music mogul Combs will likely remain held in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center.
Diddy at MDC Brooklyn
There are 1,218 people at the Metropolitan Detention Center, which is located in the Eastern New York Judicial District, according to the Bureau of Prisons.
Like the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the MDC is also “plagued by chronic understaffing, constant lockdowns, outbreaks of violence, delayed access to medical care, and a rash of suicides and death,” The Daily Beast reported.
“Several courts in this District have recognized that the conditions at Metropolitan Detention Center are not fit for pre-trial detention,” Combs’ lawyers said in a motion they filed for bail Tuesday, per the news outlet.
Mentioned by Combs’ attorneys in their filing was a June 7 incident where Uriel Whyte, a man who had been at MDC for gun charges, was stabbed to death in the facility. Spectrum News New York reported that Whyte was awaiting trial on gun charges for two years.
A second man named Edwin Cordero died after being injured in a jail fight in August. Cordero’s lawyer, The New York Times reported, wrote about the “awful” conditions his client faced in a June letter to a federal judge.
The prison, Cordero’s lawyer said, is “an overcrowded, understaffed and neglected federal jail that is hell on earth.” Along with the deaths this past summer, suicides and an electrical fire in 2019 that caused those in the prison to be without heat and power for days have been reported at MDC.
Judges and advocates have called out the Bureau of Prisons for “dangerous, barbaric conditions” in MDC, and pressed the agency to make improvements.
In a statement to the Associated Press, the federal Bureau of Prisons said it is “addressing the staffing and other challenges at MDC Brooklyn.”
An agency team is working to fix problems, the bureau said, by adding permanent correctional and medical staff, remedying more than 700 backlogged maintenance requests and answering judges’ concerns, among other actions taken.
The Associated Press has investigated and reported on deep, previously unreported flaws at other facilities within the Bureau of Prisons, including dozens of escapes, chronic violence, deaths and severe staffing shortages that have hampered responses to emergencies, including inmate assaults and suicides.
NewsNation’s Cassie Buchman and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
