Add some $7 billion and four years to the plan to close Rikers Island; according to city records, the new jails in Queens and the Bronx won’t be finished until 2031 — four years after the City Council’s 2027 deadline — and at astronomical cost. The earliest new jail, for Brooklyn, won’t be ready until at least 2029. Even then, the city might have thousands more detainees than will fit in the already-expanded facilities.
Obviously, jail space can’t exactly be made flexibly. A particular jail has a certain capacity, and that’s that; overcrowding is, in itself, a humanitarian issue, and we can’t fix the horror that is Rikers simply by stuffing people into other dangerous and unsanitary conditions.
The lawmakers who devised the Rikers closure plan years ago knew this, and knew they had to pick a date on the calendar and a target number for the new borough-based jails’ capacity. There’s nothing wrong with being a little optimistic about trends in criminal justice, but it seems clear now that it was not the right move to depend absolutely on a jail population dropping like a rock indefinitely, to 3,300 beds in a city of 8.6 million.
We can’t say that there’s a right number, per se, and the ideal capacity may well be below the 6,000 or so people currently held on Rikers. But the system needs some slack. The expansion of capacity to 4,160 bought some of that slack, but potentially not enough, and with additional time and expense.
It’s always frustrating when a public infrastructure project goes well beyond initial projections on cost and timeline, but this is substantively different than, say, a still-rutted road or a long-delayed school. The remoteness of Rikers Island keeps it farther away from prying eyes in a way that has contributed to the city’s failures to keep detainees safe and healthy.
Attorneys and families have a difficult time getting to the island, and the entire complex’s physical infrastructure is falling apart in a way that has been repeatedly found to actually endanger the people there. The current isolated and sprawling complex also gives DOC staff cover to neglect their duties, including by having set up a full clubhouse in a decommissioned building.
As short-sighted as the Council’s 2019 legislation might have been, it remains a legal requirement for the administration to do everything in its power to complete the closure of the facility and move detainees to the borough-based jails, which might entail strategies to thin out the jail population.
City Hall has intimated that this would jeopardize public safety, but we already know that a good chunk of people on Rikers should really be in a mental health care setting instead. The city is already planning on reducing the number of mental health units at the local jails in order to increase overall capacity, so it should double down on providing these services elsewhere.
We also understand that these are sizable and complicated projects, but large buildings get constructed on shorter timetables all the time, without these completions being mandated by law.
By all means, close down Rikers as fast as possible. But since it seems impossible to make the 2027 deadline, maybe the law with the date needs to be amended. It’s that or break the law.