Jails in the boroughs
Thursday, the City Council must approve plans to put humane, modern new jails in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan, enabling the closure of the arcane, dangerous and isolated old facilities at Rikers Island. Approving these new detention centers should not be seen as endorsement of Mayor de Blasio’s mistake-ridden rollout of a blueprint to replace Rikers. This is an endorsement of criminal-justice common sense.
De Blasio erred when, out of the gate, he said every borough would be holding innocent-until-proven-guilty people (along with a handful of city-sentenced convicts and others) — but ruled out Staten Island. He erred when, after insufficient community consultation, he chose a questionable site for a new facility in the Bronx.
He erred this weekend when he and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson announced that the city’s jail population, which has fallen precipitously in recent years as crime has dropped and alternatives to pretrial detention have grown, will drop to 3,300 by 2026. The purely political prognostication is an attempt to win over resistant members of the Council. But what if violent crime rises or state policy reforms backfire and are pulled back?
Like Sideshow Bob of “The Simpsons” fame, de Blasio has stepped on rake after rake.
Notwithstanding, the Council has a simple, binary choice: Give a thumbs-up to what is a thoughtful and necessary plan to replace terrible detention facilities with decent new ones nearer courts, lawyers, families and communities, or miss an opportunity that may never come again.
Rikers Island is an awful place. New jails will be safer, with better sight-lines for guards. They will be more humane, with sunlight and climate control and meeting and recreation rooms. They will hold far fewer people, thanks to a still-declining jail population, but must still be large enough to lock up those deemed flight risks.
A vote to build the new jail facilities will continue an expensive but long-overdue transformation of pretrial detention in New York City. A vote against, whether under the supposedly progressive banner or “No New Jails” or not, will cram people into terrible old cells, either on Rikers or in existing borough jails.
Greenlight this plan.