A commission on closing the Rikers Island jail complex urged New York City to appoint two senior officials to focus solely on shutting down the notoriously troubled jail, part of a series of recommendations designed to accomplish a goal mandated six years ago.
The city is not on track to meet the deadline of August 2027 to close Rikers, required by a law the City Council passed in 2019. But the goal could be furthered by having one person in City Hall and another embedded in the Department of Correction whose only job is to get it done, said a report released this week from a group that the speaker of the City Council, Adrienne Adams, convened.
“Decrepit, dysfunctional, and violent, Rikers is a crumbling, inordinately expensive incubator of misery and reoffending,” the report said. “Every day its eight operating jails are open, incarcerated people and staff are at grave, unnecessary risk, and public safety is degraded.”
The report was released days after the death of a 20-year-old who was found in his cell at Rikers Island. The man, Ariel Quidone, had been arrested on robbery charges this month. He was the third person this year to die either while being held at city jails or shortly after being released from custody.
The independent commission’s new report is the second time city leaders have been given a path toward closing the complex and replacing it with four borough-based jails. The proposed jails are meant to be more humane and closer to detainees’ lawyers and families. The report proposes changes that are intended to ease overcrowding in the lockups and assist neighborhood that would have the new, smaller jails.
Closing Rikers would save $2.2 billion annually in operating and overtime costs, the new report said. Holding one detainee costs more than $400,000 annually.
The proposal to push to shut Rikers was released in a move to get the issue in the forefront of debate during this year’s highly contested mayoral race — in which Ms. Adams, who has pushed for closure of the complex, is a candidate. The recommendations, detailed in more than 100 pages, come nearly a decade after a first iteration of the group was created.
Resistance from residents where the four borough jails are to be built has been vigorous, hindering efforts to start construction. Simultaneously, the jail population has grown to around 6,500, while the new jails are to have only about 4,500 beds. Construction costs for the jails rose to $15.5 billion from an estimated $8.7 billion.
The plan has been caught in a bitter standoff between the City Council and Mayor Eric Adams, who is not related to the speaker. Mr. Adams said when he ran for office he supported closing Rikers, but in recent years, he has cast doubt on the idea.
A backdrop to the debate is a federal lawsuit that could jeopardize city control of Rikers. For nearly a decade, a judge has been monitoring the jails’ compliance with a court order meant to improve them. Conditions continued to deteriorate, and in November, the judge found the city in contempt for failing to stem violence and excessive force.
According to the commission, composed of 41 stakeholders and led by the state’s former chief judge Jonathan Lippman, the city should accelerate the building of the borough jails. It should invest in neighborhoods where they would be constructed, especially Manhattan’s Chinatown and Mott Haven in the Bronx.
The new plan is “clear and not complicated,” Mr. Lippman said in an interview this week. There is a consensus that Rikers must close, he said, but “there has been a lack of urgency, a lack of will and a lack of policy support to get this done.”
“This is an eyesore, a stain, and every day that horrible place stays open, more people die, more people are subject to violence,” Mr. Lippman said.
The complex is the country’s second-largest psychiatric facility, the report said — about 57 percent of its population has a mental illness. A closing plan should include building 500 secure psychiatric treatment beds outside the jails, allocated to detainees with severe mental illness, the commission said.
To decrease Rikers’s population, the city also should speed up criminal cases and invest in supportive housing and rehabilitative and re-entry programming, the report said.
The new plan would also fulfill the wishes of crime victims, the commission said. A poll found that they “overwhelmingly support moving people with mental illness into secure treatment facilities instead of jails, speeding up trials, and housing people who cannot safely be released in smaller jails near courthouses.”
As it is, Rikers is an “unacceptable” danger to staff who work in violent conditions, said Zachary Katznelson, executive director of the commission. The staff and detainees at the complex are overwhelmingly Black and Latino.
“This is very much very disproportionately felt in terms of who bears the brunt of all the failures of Rikers day in and day out,” Mr. Katznelson said.
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