Separate and alone: How Nicolás Maduro and his wife can expect to be treated in jail

By Brynn Gingras, Mark Morales, Alisha Ebrahimji, Sarah Boxer, CNN

(CNN) — They went from the palace to the big house.

Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, can reasonably expect two things to happen as they get accustomed to their new day-to-day life at the notorious Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York: They will be uncomfortable and kept out of harm’s way.

“It truly is hell,” federal prison consultant Sam Mangel told CNN. “There is very little HVAC. There is very little heating. Every inmate gets one wool blanket. They’re on a very thin 2-inch mattress pillow combination on a metal slab.”

The ousted Venezuelan president and first lady are the latest high-profile detainees to be held in the federal jail known as MDC, with a documented history of power outages, staffing shortages and detainee complaints.

CNN could not determine precisely how the couple is being treated. Neither prison officials nor lawyers representing the couple responded to requests for comment.

Mangel as well as a former federal prisons official and a defense attorney with clients housed at MDC told CNN of the prison’s challenging conditions and how high-profile detainees are typically handled in such an environment.

The federal Bureau of Prisons doesn’t comment on current inmates, but Mangel said Maduro and Flores are likely housed in a segregated area, not with the general population — in separate cells and alone.

“His case, he is a security risk in general population,” Mangel said. “No one knows what other inmates might think of him, other gang members, other cartel members, so putting him in general population at any time … I think would be tremendous security risk for the facility.”

Before their US military capture on Saturday, the couple had lived at Miraflores Palace, a sprawling presidential residence known for its neoclassical architecture, large windows, grand halls and manicured courtyards.

They are now among detainees who include a mix of suspects and defendants, including people accused of serious crimes, high-profile cases, and others awaiting sentencing or transfer.

In their first court appearance in New York Monday, Maduro and Flores pleaded not guilty to drug and weapons charges and chose, at least for now, not to fight their detention.

The judge informed the couple that “as citizens of the state of Venezuela, you have a right to consult with consular officials of that state.” The prosecutor said he would look into that, and the judge said to get back to him on “when and where it will happen.”

Maduro and his wife probably have no regular contact with each other, unless both have scheduled their meetings with their attorneys at the same time, said Hugh Hurwitz, who ran the Bureau of Prisons from May 2018 to August 2019.

In the meantime, Maduro could possibly spend his time in a small recreational area within the jail, an area that would be much smaller than it would be in a larger facility, Hurwitz said.

Hurwitz made his assessments based on his experience as acting director of the federal prison system.

The life of inmates segregated from the general population includes a 6 a.m. wake-up call, with time scheduled to meet their attorneys daily, outdoor exercise five hours a week, and daily visits by health personnel, according to the Bureau of Prisons handbook.

Inmates in the jail’s Special Housing Unit, known as the SHU, where it’s likely Maduro is being housed, are kept in solitary confinement under restrictive conditions, Daniel McGuinness, a criminal defense and civil rights litigation attorney who represents several clients housed at MDC, told CNN.

Inmates spend up to 23 hours locked down inside their cells with restrictive escort protocols in place when they do move outside of them, and have limited access to legal phone calls, according to a Justice Department report.

“I don’t know whether they’re locking him in his cell 23 hours a day … but no doubt he’s in a secure unit where nobody can access him,” Hurwitz said. “I’m sure they’re keeping him separated from other inmates. If they are putting him with anybody, it’s somebody that they’ve vetted and know is not going to be a problem.”

Indeed, MDC, described by attorneys and inmates alike as “disgusting” with “horrifying” conditions, is a dangerous place, where in 2024 two inmates were killed by fellow inmates using makeshift weapons, according to federal prosecutors.

Hurwitz expects that the security protocols in place are with the case of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein top of mind.

Epstein died by suicide in 2019 at another pretrial detention center in Manhattan that has since closed.

“They can’t afford to have another Epstein incident,” Hurwitz said.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

CNN’s Evan Perez and Lauren del Valle contributed to this report.