MDC Brooklyn opened its doors in January 1994 in the Sunset Park neighborhood, built specifically to hold people awaiting trial or sentencing in the Eastern District of New York's federal courts. Part of its site required demolishing an old Bush Terminal warehouse building that had once served the Coast Guard. Originally designed for around 1,000 detainees, it has held both men and women across various security levels and today runs well over its original design capacity. MDC Brooklyn has become one of the more talked-about federal facilities in the country, both for the high-profile defendants who've passed through it and for serious problems with basic conditions — most notably a week-long heating and power failure during a brutal cold snap in January 2019 that left inmates without heat, hot water, or reliable lighting, eventually leading to a multimillion-dollar legal settlement. It has also drawn scrutiny over crowding and access to counsel. For families, it helps to know this is a pretrial detention center, so populations shift often and stays tend to be shorter and less predictable than at a standard prison.