On the morning of Friday, Sept. 20, Sean “Diddy” Combs – now known by the Bureau of Prisons as Register Number 37452-054 – was served a 6:00 a.m. breakfast of cereal, fruit and a breakfast cake.
The previous day, multiple sources confirmed first to PEOPLE that Combs had been placed on suicide watch at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center in the first days of his incarceration on racketeering and sex crime charges. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
His lawyers tell PEOPLE he is “strong, healthy, and focused on his defense,” adding in a statement Friday: “He is committed to fighting this case and has full confidence in both his legal team and the truth.”
Representing the singer, Marc Agnifilo and Teny R. Geragos, wrote in a bail proposal rejected by two Manhattan judges earlier this week that the Brooklyn facility is “not fit for pre-trial detention,” calling the conditions there “horrific.”
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Cameron Lindsay, a retired warden of MDC-Brooklyn and an expert witness in corrections, tells PEOPLE the rapper has a long road ahead at the Brooklyn facility.
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“His huge celebrity status and the allegations of violence against women make him a very attractive target for assault,” Lindsay says. “And in the subculture – in the world of jails and prisons – to deliver a hit on somebody like him would be considered a badge of honor.”
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Calling the facility “austere,” and “cold,” the former warden adds: “Everything is planned. It’s not a life.”
The rapper would not have access to the internet and any outside recreational time would be spent in an enclosed area, according to Lindsay.
The new surroundings appears to represent a stark shift from the music mogul’s longtime celebrity life, complete with a $48 million residence and his own personal plane, which his lawyers told the court at his Tuesday, Sept. 17 arraignment he has been trying to sell.
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Scott Taylor, a spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons, who declined to confirm Combs’ specific housing specifications to PEOPLE, citing “privacy, safety, and security reasons,” confirms that like the other 1,217 inmates at the facility as of Friday, Combs has a 6:00 a.m. wake-up call and is expected to have his bed made by 7:30 a.m.
Federal inmates are also subject to “at a minimum, five official inmate counts during every 24- hour period” and must be “standing at bedside,” for some of those checks, per the 55-page Inmate Admission & Orientation Handbook, a paper copy of which Combs would have received when he was booked into the facility.
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On weekdays, lunch is served at 11:00 a.m. and dinner is served after the 4 p.m. headcount, per the handbook. (Weekends and holidays are on a slightly shifted schedule.)
R&B singer R. Kelly was housed at MDC-Brooklyn, leading up to his own 2021 federal conviction for sex crimes in the Eastern District Court of New York. His lawyer, Nicole Blank Becker, alleges to PEOPLE that guards took advantage of his celebrity status and forced him to sing.
In a phone interview, Blank Becker called Kelly’s time at the Brooklyn facility “mentally crippling” and “one of the worst experiences that I have ever heard of.”
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“If Diddy is going to be experiencing anything like I know R. Kelly experienced, it’s not going to be good,” Blank Becker says, adding her opinion that the jail is “not at all” safe.
“On the daily, we were concerned about whether or not R. Kelly was alive, frankly,” she says, adding: “It is inhumane, a whole other world. I mean, grown men cry.”
In a statement to PEOPLE, Taylor said that the Federal Bureau of Prisons “takes seriously our duty to protect the individuals entrusted in our custody, as well as maintain the safety of correctional employees and the community.”
Acknowledging “the staffing and other challenges at MDC Brooklyn,” – staffing, he says, is now at about 76 percent – he said an Urgent Action Team had been appointed “to take a holistic look at the challenges at MDC Brooklyn,” including increasing permanent staffing of correctional officers and medical staff and addressing more than 700 backlogged maintenance requests.
• Additional reporting by Elizabeth Rosner and Danielle Bacher
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