Plan to close notorious Rikers jail complex by 2026 approved

NEW YORK >> 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.

“Mass incarceration did not begin in New York City, but it will end here,” de Blasio said this week. “We are proving you don’t need to arrest your way to safety.”

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.

With falling crime rates, the number of people incarcerated in the city on a daily basis has declined from a high of nearly 22,000 in 1991 to about 7,000 today. City officials announced this week that they believe they can shrink the jail population even further by 2026, to just 3,300 prisoners.

Backers of the jail overhaul say they expect the city’s jail population will keep dropping because of criminal justice reforms.

Several district attorneys in the city have said they are no longer prosecuting small-time marijuana possession cases. The police department, after ages of measuring officers by how many people they put in handcuffs, has slashed arrests for misdemeanors as officers have been encouraged to write tickets for minor offenses, rather than drag people to jail.

A new state law is set to eliminate cash bail for most misdemeanor and nonviolent arrests. Once the law goes into effect in January, far fewer poor people will be held in jail while awaiting trial.

Critics of the plan, however, say fewer cells may mean more violent criminals on city streets.

Seth Barron, project director of the NYC Initiative at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, questions whether the city can really drive incarceration rates as low as they want without compromising public safety.

“It’s not clear how they’re going to get these numbers and it’s politically driven,” Barron said. “It’s a big risk because we’ve already taken all the nonviolent people out of Rikers.”

Barron blames the effort to empty the city’s jails for the beating deaths of four homeless men in Manhattan’s Chinatown this month.

Randy Santos, the man charged with attacking the men as they slept, had been recently freed from jail after several arrests for previous, less serious attacks on other people.

“What is clear is that progressive social policies gave Santos the freedom to feed his addictions and nurture his insanity — until he murdered four innocent people,” Barron wrote in the institute’s City Journal .

The plan calls for moving inmates to four new or expanded jails in each city borough except Staten Island, making it easier for the inmates to receive visits from lawyers and family members who will no longer have to travel to an island.