City poised to close notorious Rikers jail complex

NEW YORK — One jail will tower over shops and restaurants in downtown Brooklyn. Another will be next to a subway yard in Queens. In the Bronx, a jail will replace a Police Department tow pound. And another jail will rise in the shadow of City Hall in Manhattan.

That is at the heart of a plan for a historic and extensive overhaul of New York City’s corrections system, a thorough remaking that will culminate with the closing of Rikers Island, the jail complex that has become notorious for chronic abuse, neglect and mismanagement.

The City Council approved the proposal Thursday, a decision that seemed nearly impossible just a few years ago and immediately places New York City at the forefront of a national movement to reverse decades of mass incarceration that disproportionately affected black and Hispanic people.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, embraced the jails plan, throwing their political weight behind the momentous reforms despite steady opposition from neighborhoods whose residents worry that the towering jails will harm their quality of life.

“It’s a humane thing that we are doing today,” said Karen Koslowitz, a council member who represents the area of Queens that would get a new jail. “I have been to Rikers. I have been to the Kew Gardens jail. They weren’t cells. They were cages.”

They also faced protests from prison abolition groups, which demonstrated outside City Hall on Thursday making the case that instead of building any jails, the city should invest in programs that would prevent people from engaging in lawbreaking behavior.

After the vote, the hard part begins. To meet its deadline of 2026, the city will have to build four new jails scattered in neighborhoods across the city, shut down a 400acre jail network on an island in the East River, and relocate thousands of inmates and corrections officers. That transition and new construction will cost more than $8 billion, the city says.

When they open, the new jails will be safer, smaller and more humane, which officials believe could make New York’s corrections system a model for the rest of the country. Prisoners will be provided job training, mental health counseling and education services.