Here is New York

The visitors center (NY Times)

It’s not everyday you can walk in and out of jail without a care in the world but, today, the NYC Department of Corrections opened up the Brooklyn House of Detention for visitors. It’s all part of the department trying to be a good neighbor.

You see, the jail was closed back in 2003 and it sat unused. Meanwhile, the surrounding neighborhood of Boerum Hill — which is next to Brooklyn Heights — boomed. High-rise condos were built, a boutique hotel went up next door and a Trader Joe’s opened. No one thought the jail would reopen but it turns out, everyone was wrong. It’s reopening tomorrow and will house up to 759 inmates. The ratio of correction officers to inmates will be 1 to 30, sometimes 1 to 50.

You can imagine this is not going over so well in the high-ticket neighborhood. As one gent who bought a $3.4 million house nearby told  The Times, “we gambled on the neighborhood and lost.”

But you think he might have spotted it because the jail was not exactly hiding in plain sight. It’s a fairly big building and looks just like a jail. The DOC didn’t build it in a gentrifying area; the area gentrified around the building. Realtors were telling folks that it would be re-developed into condos but, oops, those plans fell through.

As soon as I heard the doors would be open today, I signed up along with about 500 other lucky souls. We were given the royal treatment inside. The correction officers could not have been nicer and we were served refreshments, including carrot cake made at Rikers Island, the city’s main jail facility. It was yummy and there was not a file to be found inside.

The Brooklyn House of Detention is not a place I’d like to spend a lot of time in but it did appear clean and freshly painted and, because it hasn’t been used in nearly a decade, there were no funky smells anywhere. We saw the clinic, the visitors room, the intake area, the kitchen and the cells. If you’ve seen even one jailhouse movie in your life, you have a good idea of what the cells look like. They were vintage — very small, with a single bed, a toilet, a tiny desk, plastic containers for clothing and another plastic container in which to wash your clothes. To dry them out, a CO informed us, an inmate could hang his unmentionables on the sink.There was a single shower nearby for the eight men (and it’s only men housed here).

One thing most New Yorkers do not know — which was made clear on the tour — is that city jails, including Rikers Island are meant to house the innocent really — those who have not yet been tried but who are unable to raise bail. The other inmates in city jails are those serving a sentence of a year or less. Any more and you’re shipped off to the state system. The Brooklyn House of Detention is especially convenient for men being tried in the Brooklyn courts. In fact, there is an underground tunnel from the jail to Criminal Court.

One of the conditions of taking the tour was no cell phones, no pictures so I left my cell phone and blackberry at home — breaking out of my own technological jail for a couple of hours. It was grand to be free!