By The Editors

Angry residents of a Brooklyn, New York neighborhood where a jail-themed jungle gym has stood in a public housing playground for six years are demanding that city officials tear down and replace the structure.

Although the bright orange play prison had stood on the spot since 2004, its presence suddenly provoked a fierce controversy this past week when a local website, blackandbrownnews.com published an article about it, demanding that a change be made and that the city “review all recreational apparatus on city-owned-operated housing developments and parks in neighborhoods where these offenses are more likely to occur.”

Carolyne Jones, 53, a resident of the Tompkins Houses project in the neighborhood, told the New York Daily News that the structure “will always be known as the jungle gym with the jail. It would be good to erase the bad memory.”

After the story broke, chagrined housing officials had ordered the gym, which had painted bars on a swinging door at its top, the word ‘JAIL’ painted in capital letters and an oversized lock painted over. They said this was a temporary measure, to give them time to find a permanent solution.

Bedford-Stuyvesant, albeit its thriving middle-class section, is one of four predominantly-black Brooklyn neighborhoods whose residents make up in sharply disproportionate terms nearly a majority of those incarcerated in the New York State prison system.