City to close 1 Rikers jail
THE CITY will close its first jail on Rikers Island next summer — part of a decade-long plan to shut down the violence-plagued jail complex, officials announced Tuesday.
The George Motchan Detention Center, which currently houses nearly 600 men, will be the first of Rikers’ nine jails to shut its doors.
But experts remained skeptical, noting that in the absence of a plan to raze the facility, it could be reopened, and inmates could be moved back inside if the population goes up.
After years of pressure, Mayor de Blasio in March said that Rikers would be closed within a decade — a move that would require cutting the city’s jail population in half.
As of Jan. 1, there were 8,705 prisoners in city jails — 6,793 of them on Rikers. December was the first month in three decades that the average daily population was below 9,000.
“There’s a seismic change underway in New York City,” said Elizabeth Glazer, director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, as she stood in front of the jail on Rikers Island on Tuesday.
“It’s not just crime is going down. We have the lowest incarceration rate of any big city.”
New York City’s incarceration rate of 167 per 100,000 people in 2016 is the lowest in any major city in the country, according to the city’s office of criminal justice.
By contrast, the rate was 252 per 100,000 people in Los Angeles and Chicago, 338 in Houston and 784 in Philadelphia in 2016.
The soon-to-be-shuttered jail is currently half full, with its 580 inmates representing 8.5% of the total Rikers population.
It was selected for closure this summer in part due to “structural issues” like broken cell doors and sewage problems, Glazer said.
Jail insiders, though, point out that the city has long closed jails when the inmate population dropped — only to reopen them when years later when the count goes back up.
In 2003, the city closed the Brooklyn House of Detention, but it was reopened close to five years later and is now regarded among the city’s most dangerous facilities.
“We always opened and closed cell blocks as the population shifted so we never had partially occupied space,” said Martin Horn, who served as correction commissioner from 2003 to 2009.
City officials said there is no immediate plan to bulldoze the facility after inmates are moved out. That means the city will still be required to heat it and assign a skeleton staff to maintain security as it does at the Queens Detention Complex.
“When they knock it down, it will be closed,” Horn said.
To shut down Rikers, the city will also have to open up new, smaller jails in other boroughs. The city is in the process of selecting a consultant to help develop that plan. Though officers would be reassigned and not laid off, their union promply ripped the plan.
“With vicious assaults on correction officers occurring nearly every week, along with a near-30% increase in inmateon-inmate slashings and stabbings departmentwide, we had hoped Mayor de Blasio would have announced a plan today to make the jails safer,” said Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association President Elias Husamudeen.
“Instead, the mayor shamelessly shared his plan to close one of the largest jail facilities on Rikers Island.”