Most people know that New York City has its own little Alcatraz, called Riker’s Island. But few know that there’s another prison in the East River, this one floating next to the new Fulton Fish market in the Bronx. The Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center is a 47, 000-ton, five-story barge with 800 beds spread over 16 “dormitories” and 100 proper jail cells. At 625 feet in length and 125 feet wide, it also holds a gym, a basketball court, a library, three chapels, a rooftop exercise area, an IMAX theater and a casino. Okay, it doesn’t really have an IMAX theater and a casino but I wanted to see if you were paying attention. Tide and punishment Built in a Louisiana shipyard in the late ’80s, the floating prison was towed up to New York in the early 90s, and it looks for all the world like it was designed by a child playing with blue and white Legos. The unattractive structure is also, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, “The world’s largest prison ship.” (Go New York.) All A-board of Corrections As for why we even have the thing, a New York Times article detailing its opening says the ship was built “as a way of trying to develop prison space more quickly and to avoid complaints from community groups about building jails in densely populated neighborhoods.” The D.O.Sea And the 800-bed facility wasn’t cheap: As the writer of this tugboat blog points out, “She was built…at a cost of $161 Million, which as usual, means it would have been cheaper to send the inmates to Harvard instead.”
