You could hear tapping on the windows from the street below, and then suddenly a call rang out from above.

“Help us!” someone yelled.

That cry was coming from inside the Metropolitan Detention Center — a federal jail in Brooklyn.

Four of the candidates for the hotly contested 10th Congressional District were at the site on Tuesday to call for better oversight and conditions at the facility they would represent if elected.

What You Need To Know

  • Four of the leading candidates in the race for New York's 10th Congressional District came together to call for reform at a federal jail, the Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park

  • Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou, Council Member Carlina Rivera, Rep. Mondaire Jones, and former federal prosecutor Dan Goldman joined forces Tuesday

  • They claim the hundreds of detainees there, who are awaiting trial, treated inhumanely

  • The effort comes as the attacks on one another heat up in the final days of the campaign

“We are standing here today calling for more active federal oversight. We are standing here today calling for an increase in medical staffing,” said Rep. Mondaire Jones.

“We must center restorative justice approaches that cause less harm to those that always have the odds stacked against them,” Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou added.

Council Member Carlina Rivera denounced “the denial of access to medical care, to food, to basic hygiene” and highlighted “the stretches of time that we have seen MDC go without heat in the dead of winter.”

And former federal prosecutor Dan Goldman joined the call “for basic humanity, basic due process, basic rights that every defendant must get.”

All those candidates — along with Assembly Member Jo Anne Simon — signed a letter to the U.S. Attorney General and the federal Bureau of Prisons calling for reforms, including screenings for all staff when entering the facility to check for contraband.

It was a clear show of unity in the final days of the race.

And it comes a day after two of these candidates, Jones and Niou, held a press conference to attack Goldman claiming he was not progressive enough for the district, which spans Lower Manhattan and western Brooklyn.

Jones went even further on Tuesday, releasing a new ad making the same point.

“I am not really worried about the process here or the false smears my opponents have been making against me,” Goldman told NY1 on Tuesday.

While these candidates came together over this Brooklyn jail, they are not all on the same page on the proposed jail on the other side of the district in Chinatown, which is supposed to help replace Rikers Island.

Rivera voted for the jail on the Council.

Goldman is undecided.

“Before I take a position on it, I want to make sure I understand everyone’s view and make sure the community has a seat at the table,” he said.

Niou is against it.

“I do not think we need more Rikers and more MDCs,” she said.

A spokesperson for Jones told NY1 he supports the plan to replace Rikers Island, but wants to make sure it doesn’t affect the surrounding community in Manhattan. 

The primary is on Aug. 23. Early voting is underway.