De Blasio’s jail break

Mayor de Blasio savored the momentousness of his bid for history Friday, starting with these words: “The city will close the Rikers Island jail facility.” Bold declarations, we’ve had a few. In de Blasio’s New York, workable plans are harder to come by.

What’s undeniable is the oppressiveness of conditions at the East River complex, that hard-ashell-to-get-to place where 7,000 men, women and teens as young as 16 — the vast majority of whom are charged with, not convicted of, crimes — are confined in archaic facilities, with corrections officers hard-pressed to maintain order.

The grand theory is to bring the overall numbers of inmates down, and move them from that forsaken place to far more modern jails, convenient to county courthouses, where people accused of crimes aren’t isolated from their families, lawyers and the like.

It would be foolish to believe that reworked jails, still stocked with tough and often mentally unstable people, will be pleasant places. But, if smartly designed, it’s hard to imagine they won’t be far better than the slash-pit that is Rikers.

Yet with all due respect to the work of a commission convened by City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and headed by former New York Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, the long road from here to there, though paved with good intentions, is full of huge pot holes. And de Blasio knows it. Mere months ago, he expressed appropriate skepticism that closing Rikers was feasible, given the mammoth cost — estimated by Lippman & Co. at $10.6 billion — and sheer numbers of inmates in city jails, steadily dwindling but still totaling 9,300 in all.

Now he says 10 years is all it will take — newly convinced, goes the tale, by arguments that by then, with continued declines in crime and diversion from criminal detention and short-term sentences, the jails can be shrunk to fewer than 5,000 souls at a time, few enough to fit elsewhere.

De Blasio’s newfound commitment takes a stand bolder in appearance than in reality, so carefully has he scoped out the exit doors to avoid political confinement by controversies sure to be in store.

First: in the City Council, which will have to approve the relocation of the city jails to sites yet to be selected in city neighborhoods not likely to roll out the welcome mat for criminal defendants and attendant traffic.

Multiply by, oh, 10 the complications de Blasio’s had siting homeless shelters and you begin to comprehend the complexity of the task.

The Lippman report advises one in each borough near court houses — in three of five instances on existing jail sites.

As part of a fleshed-out blueprint, de Blasio owes the city proposed locations, and soon.

Then: in the state Legislature, counted on to enact bail reforms, to send more teens to Family Court, and to speed trials, each subtracting from the jails’ population.

Then: in the courts — and the judges and prosecutors who would have to get on board with a recommended push to release more low-level defendants into the community while awaiting trial — which are a branch of government not under his control.

Not least: in the city’s already straining budget, which must be tapped for the billions necessary to build new state-of-the-art jails — funds that may or may not be recouped by selling off real estate freed in the shuffle, including the enticing possibility of building a third runway for LaGuardia Airport.

At least in theory, that ought to please Gov. Cuomo, who’s rehabbing LaGuardia and who has for many months now needled de Blasio to shut down Rikers.

But so busy was the mayor boasting that he and the Council will “end the era of mass incarceration in New York City” — mass being a relative term, given numbers less than half of what they were 20 years ago — that he couldn’t spare much thought for what comes next.