Tragic jail kin hits Bill ‘stunt’
THE BROTHER of Kalief Browder slammed Mayor de Blasio’s newfound support for closing Rikers Island as “a publicity stunt” Monday as Gov. Cuomo said 10 years to shut it down was too long.
Akeem Browder told the Daily News he was skeptical of de Blasio’s plan — noting his change of heart regarding the troubled jail came in an election year.
De Blasio has offered few details about how he would close Rikers. “It’s an election season. it makes sense for any politician trying to get into office,” said Browder, 34. “It’s a publicity stunt.”
Kalief Browder was arrested when he was 16 and spent three years in the jail without a trial — most of it in solitary confinement. He hanged himself at 22 after struggling with the trauma of incarceration.
Cuomo — during a news conference in Harlem about a new state law raising the age at which teens can be charged with a crime from 16 to 18 — also took a shot at de Blasio’s Rikers timetable.
“Rikers Island is an abomination. And don’t tell me it’s going to take 10 years to fix that abomination. Because if you want to do something, you do it, and it doesn’t have to take 10 years,” Cuomo said.
Akeem Browder joined Cuomo at the event.
A teenage inmate at Rikers who later worked there as an engineer for the Department of Correction, Akeem Browder became a full-time activist after his brother’s suicide, starting an advocacy group called Shut Down Rikers.
Browder called the 10-year timetable “a distraction” from larger, systemic challenges involving mental health treatment, reentry programs for recently released inmates and the overall culture at Rikers Island.
“It wasn’t the walls — the Rikers Island jail didn’t kill my brother,” Browder said.
“It was the culture of violence that made my brother commit suicide.”
On March 31, de Blasio said he’d changed his stance on closing Rikers because of declining crime rates.
If the jail population is reduced to 5,000 from the current 9,300, it can be closed, he said.
But New Yorkers deserve a more radical approach that pumps unprecedented money into alternatives to incarceration, Browder said.
He saw high recidivism rates and the proposal to build five new jails as linked.
“If you build it, they will fill it,” he said.
City Hall did not respond to a request for comment.