Metropolitan Correctional Center, Chicago

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Aerial view

The Metropolitan Correctional Center, Chicago (MCC Chicago) is a federal remand center in the United States, located in downtown Chicago, Illinois, at the intersection of Clark and Van Buren Streets. It has a triangular footprint, and has an exercise yard for the prisoners on its roof.

MCC Chicago is an administrative facility designed to house Federal prisoners of all security levels, including both male and female offenders appearing before Federal courts in the Northern District of Illinois.

The women are housed on the 12th floor, which holds roughly 45 inmates. The “cells” are actually two person rooms, furnished with bunk beds, a locker for each woman, a toilet and washbasin, and usually a small counter.

The main floor is a large triangle rooms with two sections on tables and attached chairs (similar to McDonald’s type furniture) at the ends and the door to the unit at the other corner. There is a television in each sitting area, and another TV in the “Spanish Room”, a room allocated for Spanish speakers to watch Spanish TV.

Breakfast is served at 6 AM, lunch at about 10:30 and dinner at 4:30. Meals are brought up in carts and each person in line is handed a tray.

Access to the outside is limited to at most twice a week for 2 hours at a time. There is also access to the gym once or twice a week. Women and men are never on the elevator at the same time, and since there are many more men than women, females often have to wait for half an hour or more for transport to other areas of the building.

There is a library that houses movies as well as books that the women can utilize twice a week, but there are not many books there. There are books carts on the floor though and the number and quality of the paperbacks it contains are good.