By Jacob Kaye
A question over the city’s plan to close Rikers Island and build four new borough-based jails as its replacement sparked one of the most contentious moments of Wednesday’s mayoral debate, the last before early voting gets underway this weekend.
Democratic nominee and frontrunner Zohran Mamdani, former governor and independent candidate Andrew Cuomo and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa sparred over what the next mayor should do about Rikers Island’s jail complex, which the city is legally obligated to close by 2027 but is currently in no shape to.
The plan to shutter Rikers and build the new jails, which was crafted under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, is years behind schedule, largely because work came to a standstill during the pandemic and never was kicked into high gear under Mayor Eric Adams.
The project has also doubled in cost. While the city once estimated the new jails, each of which are designed to be smaller and more humane than the facilities currently on Rikers, would run the city $8 billion, the final figure is currently projected to be closer to $16 billion.
There’s also the issue of the jail’s population. Rikers currently houses around 7,100 detainees, a little less than double the amount that will be able to be housed in all four of the borough-based jails combined. While the jail’s population was largely decreasing during the years leading up to the pandemic, it began to spike in de Blasio’s final years in office and has continued to rise each month during Adams’ term.
All the while, violence on Rikers has continued. Over 100 New Yorkers have died in the city’s jails over the past decade, and thousands have been stabbed, beaten up by guards or gotten into fights with fellow detainees. The danger to detainees and staff has been so stubborn that a federal judge earlier this year said she will soon strip a number of elements of control over the jails away from the city and hand it over to a third-party receiver.
Mamdani, the race’s frontrunner, has long said that he wants the city to stick to its plan to close Rikers Island by 2027, despite the fact that even those most supportive of the close Rikers movement say the deadline is now impossible to meet.
The Queens assemblymember said on Wednesday night that he would “do everything in my power to try and meet that deadline.”
“We have to close Rikers Island,” Mamdani said. “Rikers Island is a stain on the history of this city.”
Cuomo blasted Mamdani’s position on the jails, and said that he would rebuild the jails on the island, and scrap the borough jails, despite the fact that all of them are currently under construction.
“Zohran has said he’d honor the law closing Rikers in 2027 – you can’t, you can’t unless you intend to release all the people on Rikers Island,” Cuomo said.
“The whole plan was a mistake,” the former governor from Queens said. “They are years late, billions over budget. I would say, scrap the county jails.”
Cuomo’s proposal, which he rolled out for the first time several weeks ago, has been blasted by criminal justice advocates and lawmakers in the City Council, who say the former governor’s plan would prove more costly than the borough-based jails and would do little to stem the violence and decrepit conditions that have come to define the island.
Cuomo and Sliwa, who has also been a longtime opponent of the borough-based jail plan, were aligned.
“You keep Rikers Island open,” he said. “There are seven functioning buildings, three others that need to be rehabbed.”
“We keep the inmates on Rikers Island, and we turn those four [borough jails] in the neighborhoods into affordable housing,” Sliwa added.
When asked what he’d do about the law on the city’s books requiring Rikers to close by 2027, Sliwa said he’d fight it in court.
In their landmark report issued earlier this year, the Independent Rikers Commission, which crafted the plan to close Rikers, said that while the deadline is out of reach, the city should not change the law until the mayor and City Council craft a detailed plan to shutter the jails.
Former Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, who chairs the commission, reaffirmed their position on Thursday.
“Rikers must close,” he said. “No delays. No detours. New York cannot build a just or safe future on the ruins of Rikers Island.”
“Keeping Rikers open for a day longer than necessary would waste billions in taxpayer dollars, violate the law, and trap another generation — disproportionally Black and Latino New Yorkers, correctional staff and incarcerated people alike — in a system of decrepit, unsafe facilities for many years to come,” he added. “The failures of Rikers ripple out to all of us, and make us all less safe. Maintaining the recidivism factory of Rikers for at least a decade longer would be an affront to crime victims past and future.”