New York City Mayor Eric Adams campaigned on a promise to back the plans for closing Rikers Island, but his tough-on-crime stance, coupled with delays on a current plan that would replace the massive 11,300-bed complex with four smaller lockups by August 2027, is forcing decisions on what would happen to the infamous city lockup.
"The mayor is going to have to make some tough decisions," former New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton told The Washington Post. "In the meantime, Rikers is a hellhole that's getting worse — not better."
Adams, during his campaign for mayor, promised to deliver on former Mayor Bill de Blasio's call to close Rikers, but he also promised a crackdown on the city's climbing crime rates.
Last week, Rikers Island was housing almost 5,700 detainees, reversing declining numbers early in the coronavirus pandemic.
The plan for the city's jails calls for tearing down Rikers and replacing it by August 2027 with four high-rise jails, one in each of the city's boroughs except for Staten Island.
The total capacity of the jails, however, would be 3,544 inmates, with each of the sites having 886 beds, meaning the jails would hold far fewer people than were locked up in Rikers Island last week.
Adams, a retired police captain, meanwhile, has been doubling down on his anti-crime policies, including returning a controversial task force that was disbanded in 2020 because of the use of aggressive tactics.
The mayor, a moderate Democrat, is also facing a difficult situation politically. Community activists in some neighborhoods want him to find new locations for the planned high-rise jails while progressives want less of a focus on putting people in jail and for him to move ahead with the plans for the new jails that were approved in 2019.
Centrist Democrats, along with the Correction Officers' Benevolent Association, are pushing Adams to build a new jail on Rikers Island and forget about the borough jails.
Several members of the mayor's inner circle, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the administration is speaking with Gov. Kathy Hochul's office about reopening some closed state prisons to house the Rikers overflow. They also said Adams wants to make the proposed new jails even smaller and to move some to less-populated neighborhoods.
Councilman Robert Holden, a Queens Democrat, said he met with city officials last week and presented a plan to build a campus-like jail complex on Rikers Island for $5.6 billion, much less than the current proposal.
He says it's "insane" to keep the current plan, because "most people don't want jails in their neighborhood. It's too expensive."
Brooklyn Democrat Councilman Lincoln Restler, however, said that Rikers must close, as "there's no lipstick to be pasted on that pig. It's a stain to our city."
Rikers Island has been infamous for years because of its ventilation and other conditions, and its corrections officers have been accused of routinely using excessive force on detainees, many of whom are in the jail awaiting their trials.
Hernandez Stroud, counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said he believes "Rikers is ripe" for a federal receivership, which would allow a federal judge to oversee city jails. This has been done in other areas, including in Alabama and the District of Columbia.
Fabien Levy, the mayor's spokesman, declined to make him available for an interview but said in a statement the city plans to continue meeting with boroughs and hear their concerns.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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