OUT OF DETENTION

City to close first jail site on Rikers Island

City officials on Tuesday said they’re taking the first step to shuttering Rikers Island — by closing a detention center that houses 600 men at the jail site this summer.

Detainees and staff at the George Motchan Detention Center will be transferred to other Rikers sites in a move that the Department of Correction said wouldn’t result in layoffs of officers, but would help reduce exorbitant overtime costs.

The agency paid out $144 million in OT in fiscal 2017, according to city data.

“This announcement is an important step in our plan to close Rikers Island and create more communitybased facilities to better serve people in custody and our hardworking correctional staff,” Mayor de Blasio said in a statement.

The closure of GMDC was made possible by a reduction in the city’s jail population to levels not seen since 1982 — hitting 8,705 as of Jan. 1. It reduces the number of jails on Rikers Island from nine to eight.

De Blasio has said the jail population needs to be reduced to 5,000 before the city can move detainees from Rikers Island to communitybased facilities in each borough.

The current borough-based facilities can house a total of only 2,300 detainees, so the city has started the process of finding sites to construct new jails.

While Tuesday’s announcement drew applause from advocates of criminal-justice reform, the head of the correction-officers union blasted the closure as both “reckless” and dangerous in the face of increased assaults against staff.

“We are baffled with his latest reckless proposal,” said Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association President Elias Husamudeen.

“Violence is up in the city’s jails and his response is to close jails!” he said. “Shifting inmates from GMDC to other facilities on Rikers Island will only further increase the assaults on correction officers.”

The rate of assaults with serious injury to staff grew by 21 percent — from .38 to .46 per 1,000 inmates — over a four-month period through October 2017, compared with the same period in 2016.

The numbers also show the rate of serious injuries to inmates over that stretch dropped by 21 percent — from 2.9 to 2.3 per 1,000 inmates.

The mayor’s plan calls for Rikers to be closed within a decade. Critics say it should be closed sooner.