Painting herself in a corner

o new jails,” went the campaign rallying cry of Tiffany Cabán, the 31year-old public defender who looks all but certain to become the next Queens district attorney. What did it really mean?

Either she knows and isn’t saying, or she just has no clue.

This much is clear: All good progressives in New York City want to shutter the hulking, outmoded and isolated complex of jails on Rikers Island.

Doing so means reducing the number of people held there from about 7,500 (6,900 of whom have yet to go to trial) to around 5,000. That smaller population would then be spread across new, safe, state-of-the-art jails in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, near courthouses and defendants’ families and lawyers.

Cabán wants to release as many people as possible (they’re innocent-until-proven-guilty, after all) pre-trial. So do we, though we probably disagree on exactly who that would mean.

But no matter how progressive one’s perspective, even if prosecutors never ask for cash bail, some people will always be held while awaiting adjudication. Accused murderers, violent rapists, felony assailants, and people deemed by judges to be serious flight risks.

The word for the facilities where those people go is jail.

Cabán used to say the city should renovate the old, now-empty eight-story Queens Detention Complex in Kew Gardens, which was built to house 467 male inmates. But would that count as a new jail? Maybe.

Now, post-election, Cabán seems to include a renovation of the Kew Gardens jail in her prohibition. Pressed in an interview with NY1 this week to say where the city should then house Queens detainees awaiting prosecution, Cabán suggested “some of the facilities that are already still available,” which is to say in Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn.

While this might please Queens residents who balk at a detention center’s impact on their property values, and while it might satisfy extreme abolitionists who think jail is never necessary, it could undermine the push to mothball Rikers.

She’s in a prison of her own promise.