Jeffrey Epstein’s Suicide Underscores Negligence in Federal Prisons, Watchdog Finds

A pattern of negligence and misconduct by staff at a federal jail in New York gave disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein a perfect opportunity to kill himself in his cell in August 2019, the Justice Department’s watchdog said in a report pointing to chronic problems within the beleaguered federal prison system.

Despite his suicide attempt just weeks earlier, in the hours before his death staff at the since shuttered Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan didn’t assign Epstein a cellmate, neglected to search his cell, failed to conduct their rounds and gave him extra bedding that he used to hang himself, the report said. Surveillance cameras around the unit where Epstein was housed were turned on but broken, so they captured no video of the area the night he died.

The jail was short-staffed, poorly managed and ill-equipped to manage suicidal inmates, the report said. One staff member assigned to supervise Epstein had worked 24 hours straight by the time the accused sex trafficker was found dead in his cell.

The “combination of negligence, misconduct and outright job performance failures” created an environment ripe for Epstein’s suicide, spurring conspiracy theories and depriving his victims of the chance to see him brought to justice, Inspector General Michael Horowitz said. “The fact that these chronic problems and failures have been recurring ones does not excuse them and gives additional urgency to the need for BOP and DOJ leadership to address them.”