NEW YORK — As he campaigned for mayor last year, Eric Adams vowed to back plans to close Rikers Island’s infamous jail complex and replace it with four smaller, more humane lockups. But after nearly three months leading America’s largest city, Adams is already at a challenging crossroads.
“The mayor is going to have to make some tough decisions,” said William Bratton, a security expert who has headed police departments here and in Los Angeles and Boston. “In the meantime, Rikers is a hellhole that’s getting worse — not better.”
The current plan would raze the 11,300-bed jail complex — which long has been plagued by horrific living conditions and officials’ malfeasance — and replace it by August 2027 with four new high-rise lockups located in each of the city’s boroughs, excluding Staten Island. Total capacity would be 3,544 inmates, with each site having 886 beds. Only one would house women.
As of last week, though, the city’s jail population had swelled to nearly 5,700 detainees, reversing a sharp decline early in the coronavirus pandemic. Adams has continued to double-down on tough-on-crime policies likely to land more people behind bars, rolling out a modified version of a controversial anti-crime task force that was disbanded in 2020 for its aggressive tactics.
The moderate Democrat and retired police captain is staring at a no-win situation politically.
Community activists and elected officials in neighborhoods identified for the new lockups are demanding he significantly reduce their size or find new locations. Many members of his party’s progressive faction want him to de-emphasize incarceration, move ahead with the project under the specifications approved in 2019 and speed the snail’s pace that has hampered construction and related work throughout the pandemic.
At the same time, centrist Democrats and the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association are among those lobbying Adams to scrap the borough-focused plan and erect a new complex on Rikers Island.
The cash-strapped city has $8.2 billion budgeted to build the new jails, but construction industry experts familiar with the project estimate costs will soar to at least $10 billion to $15 billion.
The mayor’s spokesman, Fabien Levy, declined to make him available for an interview. In response to questions submitted in writing, Levy said in a statement that the city would “continue to meet with communities, hear their concerns, and incorporate their feedback into the ongoing process.”
According to several members of the mayor’s inner circle and other longtime confidants, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the deliberations, the Adams administration is in talks with Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office about reopening some shuttered state prisons to temporarily relieve existing problems on the island. Those prisons would then house any overflow of detainees in the future borough-based jails.
They also said Adams wants to shrink the size of the proposed lockups and potentially relocate some to less-populated neighborhoods, as well as direct some people leaving the city’s jail system to “supportive housing” units he pledged during his candidacy to create by converting shuttered hotels. Residents would be offered access to mental health care and other social services.
Councilman Robert Holden, a Queens Democrat, is among those pushing the administration to reconsider the future of Rikers. He said he met with top city officials last week and presented a cheaper alternative: building a college-campus-like jail complex on the 413-acre island for an estimated $5.6 billion.
The 63-page proposal, drafted by architects and engineers opposing a new jail in Lower Manhattan, calls for a hospital, athletic fields, work-training centers, a farming area and ferry service.
“It would be insane” not to scrap the current plan, Holden said. “Most people don’t want jails in their neighborhood. It’s too expensive.”
Yet Councilman Lincoln Restler, a Brooklyn Democrat whose district includes one of the proposed jail sites, thinks that continuing to keep detainees on Rikers is all but criminal. “Rikers must close,” he said. “There’s no lipstick to be pasted on that pig. It’s a stain on our city.”
Located in the East River between Queens and the Bronx, the island was a garbage dump before being converted into a jail complex in the early 1930s. Most detainees today are people of color who haven’t been convicted of a crime and are awaiting trial. Many suffer from mental illness.
Confinement conditions there have historically been so abysmal that the city’s jail system has been under federal oversight by a court-appointed monitor for 40 years. The Rikers complex continues to be troubled by poor ventilation and unsanitary conditions, among other problems. Its correction officers have long been accused of routinely using excessive force on detainees.
At least 16 people died while in custody in city jails last year, the most reported deaths since 2013. On Friday, a 52-year-old man died on Rikers Island after being held there since February. His was the correction system’s second death in as many days — and the third this year.
Hernandez Stroud, counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said he believes the problems are so bad that “Rikers is ripe” for a federal receivership — a seldom-used judicial intervention that would allow a federal judge to govern city jails. Such action, he noted, has helped poorly run prison systems, including Alabama’s and the District of Columbia’s, to remedy entrenched problems.
Despite decades of appalling conditions, it took the highly publicized suicide of Kalief Browder in 2015 before city officials undertook serious reforms on Rikers. The 22-year-old hung himself at home after spending three hellish years at Rikers as a teenager — including nearly two in solitary confinement — while awaiting trial for allegedly robbing a backpack. He was never convicted of a crime.
In 2016, City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito called for the island’s facilities to be closed and formed an independent commission to make recommendations on how best to do so. The following year, the commission’s findings spurred de Blasio to announce that Rikers would be shut down. He unveiled his jails plan, and by 2019 all necessary government approvals were secured.
The council added an extra deterrent by approving legislation ceasing all jail activities on the island after 2027, so any effort to build new lockups there requires future legislative action.
Mark-Viverito said she’s “hopeful” Adams keeps that plan on track. She expressed frustration that de Blasio “did little” to move the project further along during his final years in office — leaving it vulnerable for reconsideration.
“Any changes now would cause a major setback and delay the whole thing,” she said.