A combination of negligence, misconduct and “outright job performance failures” created an environment which allowed notorious child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to commit suicide in his New York prison cell in 2019, a report released Tuesday by the Department of Justice claimed.
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The report from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) details the results of the investigation into the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ custody, care, and supervision of Jeffrey Epstein at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York City.
Epstein was arrested in 2019 on federal charges for the sex trafficking of minors in Florida and New York.
The 66-year-old was found hanged in his New York jail cell a month later on Aug. 10, 2019, while awaiting trial.
His death was ruled a suicide by the city’s medical examiner.
The OIG’s investigation and review identified “numerous and serious failures by MCC New York staff,” and multiple violations of MCC and Bureau of Prisons (BOP) policies and procedures.
MCC staff failed to carry out a directive to assign Epstein a cellmate, and allowed Epstein to make an unmonitored phone call the evening before his death.
Staff also failed to do routine inmate counts and 30-minute rounds, and did not ensure the functionality of the video camera surveillance system.
Prison supervisors knowingly and willfully falsified BOP records to show that they had completed their mandatory rounds between Aug. 9 and 10 when they had not done so.
These failures, among others, led to Epstein being “unmonitored and alone in his cell” with an “excessive amount of bed linens” from the night before his death until he was discovered dead in his cell the following day, the federal watchdog report says.
While the report found that MCC New York Staff engaged in “serious misconduct,” they did not find any evidence for any criminality relating to Epstein’s death.
The OIG did not find evidence that anyone was present in Epstein’s Special Housing Unit except for other inmates that were locked in their cells, nor did they find any evidence to contradict the city medical examiner’s conclusion that Epstein’s death was a suicide.
“The combination of negligence, misconduct, and outright job performance failures documented in this report all contributed to an environment in which arguably one of the BOP’s most notorious inmates was provided with the opportunity to take his own life,” the report says.
According to the OIG, the staff’s negligence and misconduct resulted in “significant questions being asked about the circumstances of his death, how it could have been allowed to happen, and most importantly, depriving his numerous victims, many of whom were underage girls at the time of the alleged crimes, of their ability to seek justice through the criminal justice process.”
The OIG provided eight recommendations to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, including assigning cellmates to inmates on suicide watch, ensuring surveillance system functionality and improving staff training, all of which were accepted.
A copy of the OIG report released Tuesday can be seen in full below:
