The scene at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park this past week was harrowing: prisoners — many of whom have yet to be convicted of a crime — relentlessly banged their fists against jail windows, some of them waving lights inside their pitch-black cells. The jail, which houses more than 1,600 inmates, had been without heat for days, just as the city’s temperatures had plummeted to single digits amid a polar-vortex event. Read more