Did you know that inmates in Federal prisons are forbidden from receiving food packages from their families? However, in State prisons, inmates are permitted to receive such packages. This discrepancy is debilitating to the health of every Federal prisoner, and it must be changed now!

Please join me by signing this petition on behalf of all inmates at MDC Brooklyn and federal facilities all across the United States. My ultimate hope is that we can force the Department of Justice to allow us to send food packages to our incarcerated loved ones.

Just how bad is it?

My husband is located at MDC Brooklyn which is a federal facility located in Brooklyn, New York and  is described as “An administrative security metropolitan detention center” on the Federal Bureau of Prisons website.  The population is listed as 1,627 total inmates both male and female.

MDC Brooklyn claims they’re short-staffed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that is the reason why they cannot operate the commissary store that sells food items to our incarcerated loved ones for purchase.  Which really means that they are denying food to inmates which is a violation of their civil rights. To deny human food is inhumane.  They are serving them bag lunches which cold cuts or unidentifiable food from their kitchen which most of the inmates do not eat due to dietary or religious restrictions.

What is frustrating is the fact that the vendors that supply commissary food to the federal facilities are able to do so because they bid on federal contracts to provide this service which we pay for out of our tax dollars.  Then we have to send our incarcerated loved ones in federal facilities money to purchase food through the commissary so essentially, we are paying for the same food twice.  

What’s even more frustrating is that the federal food suppliers and contractors are still getting paid, and the food is still being sent to the facility, yet it is left on shelves to rot while our incarcerated loved ones go hungry.

In the immortal words of Nelson Mandela, “No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens but its lowest ones.”

Can you imagine living in those conditions? Yet even our political prisoners and war criminals are treated better than the prisoners at MDC Brooklyn.

Inside MDC, the inmates are forced to wash with toilet water. They only eat twice a day. In addition, the prison isn’t clean and disinfected to prevent the spread of COVID. There are no clean clothes, let alone clean cells.

And when you take a closer look inside the MDC Brooklyn prison, it’s a dark, grim picture of our country as a whole. Our incarcerated loved ones at MDC Brooklyn and federal correctional facilities all across the United States are starving by being denied access to food and are forced to live in inhumane conditions due to Covid. It’s time this mistreatment of our incarcerated loved ones stops.

My name is Kiki, my husband’s name is Tony. He was raised in Brooklyn. I grew up between the Bronx and Queens. I met my husband when I was going through a rough divorce from my first husband, and l was extremely depressed. My husband saved my life and pulled me out of my depression. He got arrested in 2010 on Federal charges and spent from 2010 to 2012 in MDC Brooklyn fighting his case. He was sentenced in 2012 to 30 years in federal prison for a crime in which not only did he not commit, he wasn’t charged with the offense either, but the harsh criminal justice laws make it legal for someone to be sentenced to uncharged conduct.  Since then some of those laws have been changed and he appealed his case and won.  He returned to MDC Brooklyn in 2019 when his sentence was vacated, and put back on court calendar for resentencing.  Then COVID happened which grinded the court system to a halt, while he sits in MDC Brooklyn living in horrible living conditions awaiting resentencing.

He saved my life, I will never stop fighting to save his.

Living with incarcerated loved one is already an incredibly difficult time in both your lives.  To know what they are living through now on a daily basis makes me sick to my stomach.

Join me in fighting for the fundamental human rights of every Federal prisoner and for your right to be able to send your loved ones food to eat. It breaks my heart that our incarcerated loved ones have no legal rights as human beings and cannot be seen or heard. They have no voice, but together we can break the silence for the inmates of MDC Brooklyn and take back their human rights!

Sign my petition today and change the conditions of our prisons forever.