Brooklyn Broadside: Brooklyn Detention Center – City Learns From Experience
There is no evidence that anyone stood around Boerum Hill this past weekend and shouted, “Hail, hail to the renovated jail.” By the same token, it is unlikely that someone else shouted out, “Hell’s bells to the 700 cells.”
However remote the possibility, either of those scenarios could have happened because the Brooklyn House of Detention is again going to start detaining people who have been arrested for nonviolent crimes and are awaiting trial.
There are 759 beds in the tall building that dates back to the 1950s. The city closed the jail in 2003, believing that all such city prisoners would best be housed on Rikers Island, but that didn’t pan out. Rikers Island was in worse shape than people thought, and jails had to be reopened or, as in the Bronx, newly built.