14Downsizing jails
City Hall plan shrinks Rikers replacement pens
The de Blasio administration announced it has scaled down its plans for new boroughbased jails to replace Rikers Island — lowering the maximum heights of the buildings and including fewer beds.
But the concession may not placate community groups who are concerned with the plan — and with the administration’s process for hearing concerns, which has included shutting the press out of meetings.
“Overall, we’ve reduced the heights of the buildings by anywhere from 30 to 45 feet,” said Liz Glazer, the director of the mayor’s office of criminal justice.
That was mainly done by reducing the amount of “swing space” — extra beds that will be available in the event some cells are not usable or populations need to be separated.
“We are planning to have no more than 5,000 people in detention. We had initially been proposing a 20% swing space factor, so proposing 6,000 beds to house no more than 5,000 individuals,” Dana Kaplan, deputy director of the criminal justice office, said. “After doing some intense engagement with the agencies, speaking with criminal justice experts across the country, we believed we can actually operate at an efficiency rate that is 15%.”
The maximum height of each proposed jail building will be reduced by varying degrees — in Manhattan, by 45 feet, in Brooklyn, by 35 feet, in the Bronx, by 30 feet, and in Queens, by 40 feet.
But the city didn’t only remove beds to make room.
“The second thing that we did that reduced heights was the proposal was to have an arraignment court at the Bronx site, that now is not going to be there,” Glazer said.
The Bronx proposal calls for building a jail on a vacant NYPD tow pound — and it’s the only one of the four jails that won’t be adjacent to a courthouse. In proposing to close Rikers Island, the administration has said inmates deserve to be housed closer to court, their attorneys, public transit and their families.
But the city will continue to centralize one group of inmates — women. They will all be housed in Queens, meaning some will be far from their home boroughs and courthouses. Glazer said the city was dealing with “competing concerns” — including providing women with separate facilities from men for visitation and intake. She noted the Queens jail would be much easier to access than Rikers Island.
“It seems as if the value of having the women together in order to provide the kinds of services and to provide the kind of visitation, when combined with the fact that we think that the transportation issues will be alleviated, outweighed having them in each individual borough,” Glazer said.
But the proposed changes released Friday seemed unlikely to quell opposition to the plan — particularly in the Bronx, where Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. has slammed the proposed site.
“The de Blasio administration has picked the wrong site to build a new jail in The Bronx, and a small decrease in the height of what they have proposed does not change that fact,” Diaz said in a statement, insisting the jail should be placed next to the borough’s courthouse.
City Hall defended its community outreach Friday — including its practice of barring local news reporters from attending informational meetings with Neighborhood Advisory Councils about the jail proposals.
“The [councils] were designed to be a cross-section of the various stakeholders in the community and to provide a space where folks could be honest about both their opposition and support, and we believe that there are folks in the meeting who need that space to be honest and to be frank with their neighbors, so we can get honest and frank feedback,” Community Affairs Commissioner Marco Carrion said.
But at one meeting in Queens, members of the publicly directly contradicted that argument — saying they wanted the press to be present, according to a recording obtained by QNS. Administration officials at the press conference Friday refused to say who decided the meetings should be closed to the media.