A U.S. District judge called for a hearing Monday into a power outage at federal prison in Brooklyn which left 1,600 inmates without heat and hot water for more than a week amid temperatures that dropped to 2°, after the prison warden’s denial of the outage was contradicted by a Department of Justice (DOJ) statement Monday.

Judge Analisa Torres ordered an evidentiary hearing for Tuesday regarding last week’s reports out of the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn. Several federal public defenders told the New York Times that their offices had been inundated with calls from about three dozen inmates, reporting little to no heating and hot water throughout the prison while temperatures dropped as low as two degrees in New York, no extra blankets, and no access to the prison commissary where they would have been able to buy sweatshirts and extra layers, due to a partial lockdown.

Heat and hot water were finally restored Sunday at about 6:30pm, and the DOJ acknowledged that the outage had taken place—contradicting earlier claims from the prison warden, who told the Times that an electrical outage had not affected the heating system.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) expressed outrage at the violation of prisoners’ rights as well as the lack of transparency regarding the prison conditions.

“Original attempts by my office and many others to receive a full, honest, and straightforward assessment of the situation were met with little information about the current conditions—and no apparent urgency to provide a remedy and explanation,” Gillibrand wrote to acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker on Sunday.

“There continues to be discrepancies regarding the depth and breadth of the conditions at MDC—and a lack of sufficient action. This lack of transparency is a failing of the most basic duties of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and appears to reflect a lack of compassion for the well-being of detainees in its care and control,” the senator added.

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