“It’s sad, it’s tragic, that it took this kind of event to finally cause the Bureau of Prisons to close this regrettable institution,” Weinberg said Thursday in a phone interview. It spurred an AP investigation that has uncovered deep, previously unreported problems within the agency, the Justice Department’s largest with more than 30,000 employees, 158,000 inmates and an $8 billion annual budget.Īn internal memo, undated but sent after Epstein’s death, attributed problems at the jail to “seriously reduced staffing levels, improper or lack of training, and follow up and oversight.” The memo also detailed steps the Bureau of Prisons has taken to remedy lapses Epstein’s suicide exposed, including requiring supervisors to review surveillance video to ensure officers made required cell checks.Įpstein’s lawyer, Martin Weinberg, said people detained at the facility endured “medieval conditions of confinement that no American defendant should have been subjected to.”

According to a memo from a unit manager, Epstein told a jail employee that he was calling his mother, who’d been dead for 15 years at that point.Įpstein's death put increased scrutiny on the Bureau of Prisons and led the agency to close the Metropolitan Correctional Center in 2021. The night before Epstein’s death, he excused himself from a meeting with his lawyers to make a telephone call to his family. The letter itself was not included among the documents turned over to the AP. 'I am not sure if I should open it or should we hand it over to anyone?” “It appeared he mailed it out and it was returned back to him,' the investigator who found the letter told a prison official by email.

gymnastics team doctor convicted of sexually abusing scores of athletes.Įpstein's letter to Nassar was found returned to sender in the jail’s mail room weeks after Epstein’s death. The documents also provide a fresh window into Epstein's behavior during his 36 days in jail, including his previously unreported attempt to connect by mail with another high-profile pedophile: Larry Nassar, the U.S. In another email, a high-ranking Bureau of Prisons official made a spurious suggestion to the agency’s director that news reporters must have been paying jail employees for information about Epstein’s death because they were reporting details of the agency’s failings - impugning the ethics of journalists and the agency's own workers. In one email, a prosecutor involved in Epstein's criminal case complained about a lack of information from the Bureau of Prisons in the critical hours after his death, writing that it was “frankly unbelievable” that the agency was issuing public press releases 'before telling us basic information so that we can relay it to his attorneys who can relay it to his family.” They shed new light on the federal prison agency's muddled response after Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell at the now-shuttered Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City. The records help to dispel the many conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein's suicide, underscoring how fundamental failings at the Bureau of Prisons - including severe staffing shortages and employees cutting corners - contributed to Epstein's death. Taken together, the documents the AP obtained Thursday provide the most complete accounting to date of Epstein's detention and death, and its chaotic aftermath. They include a detailed psychological reconstruction of the events leading to Epstein's suicide, as well as his health history, internal agency reports, emails, memos and other records. Nearly four years later, the AP has obtained more than 4,000 pages of documents related to Epstein’s death from the federal Bureau of Prisons under the Freedom of Information Act.

Norfolk city jail records