Plan to close notorious Rikers jail complex approved
New York City lawmakers voted Thursday to close the notorious Rikers Island jail complex, which has become synonymous with violence and neglect, and replace it with four smaller jails intended to be more modern and humane.
The City Council voted 36-13 to replace the complex with four smaller jails located closer to the city’s main courthouses in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens.
Rikers is scheduled to shutter by 2026, ending a decadeslong run as one of the world’s largest jails.
“Rikers Island is a symbol of brutality and inhumanity and it is time for us to once and for all close Rikers Island,” said City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, a Democrat who shepherded the plan through the Council. “As a city we must do everything we can to move away from the failed policies of mass incarceration.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio and other Democrats support the plan, which has a price tag of more than $8 billion, in part because of a belief that in an age of falling crime rates, huge jails are part of the public safety problem rather than part of the solution.
“This is one of those moments where a cycle gets broken. There’s been a cycle of incarceration,” de Blasio said at a news conference after the vote. He added, “It ends now. That cycle ends now.”
Members of the council spoke in emotional terms about the significance of closing Rikers. Councilman Daniel Dromm invoked the names of former inmates who have died, including Kalief Browder, who took his own life at age 22 after being held for three years at Rikers, and Layleen Polanco, a transgender woman who was found dead in her cell at Rikers last June.
But some opponents of the plan said they don’t want the city to build any new jails. “There is nothing in the plan that guarantees closing Rikers,” said Councilman Carlos Menchaca, who voted no. “I do not trust this mayor. Do you?”
The vote on the plan was disrupted by anti-jail activists who chanted “If you build it they will fill it” and threw flyers from the balcony. City officials say a steep drop in the jail population has made it feasible to close Rikers, a complex of 10 jails on an island between Queens and the Bronx that mainly houses inmates awaiting trial.