The New York City Department of Design and Construction and the architecture studio HOK will begin construction of the world’s tallest prison in Chinatown, a 335 foot tall building that will serve as one of four prisons replacing Rikers Island.
The plan to build the Chinatown jail, first proposed by former Mayor Bill DeBlasio, has since been embraced by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his administration.
Construction of the new prison includes demolishing the Manhattan Detention Complex at 125 White Street, known as “The Tombs”, building a new skyscraper complete with 1040 beds and installing a pedestrian passageway at street level.
Mamdani has cited humanitarian concerns as his core reason for shutting down Rikers Island. “For decades, Rikers Island has represented one of the deepest failures of our city government. It has failed people in custody, correction officers, and every New Yorker who believes our justice system should live up to its name”, he said.
According to the Vera Institute of Justice, seven people have died in city custody so far in 2026, with two such deaths at Rikers Island. Approximately 85% of the island’s inmates are pretrial detainees, meaning that they have not yet been convicted of a crime.
For city contractors and consulting companies, the plan to shut down Rikers Island has also provided significant windfalls.
The DeBlasio administration initially paid McKinsey and Company, a consulting giant, $27.5 million to develop a plan to end jail violence, despite the firm lacking prior experience with prison reform.
“These units [reformed by McKinsey] experienced substantial reductions in violence as measured against comparably classified inmate populations”, a McKinsey spokesperson said.
Nonetheless, McKinsey’s data errors and preference for expensive analytics software caused conflict with the city’s Department of Correction. “The department never ended up using many of those data products, some of which simply did not work very well”, a ProPublica report said.
Beyond the consulting industry, the skyscraper prison has also led to significant revenue for major construction contractors.
Tutor Perini, the Department of Correction’s construction partner, disclosed that its earnings totaled $3.76 billion from the prison. The building itself was designed by HOK Architects, one of America’s largest architectural studios. HOK did not disclose its earnings.
Despite the high revenue enjoyed by these contractors, property values are likely to fall for Chinatown homeowners.
“The construction of a new jail usually puts downward pressure on prices, as would-be homeowners are reluctant to have a large fortified building in their neighborhood,” said Joel Berner, a senior economist at Realtor.com.
With construction ongoing, many Chinatown residents are unconvinced by the prison development, citing a decline in quality of life and business disruptions.
“We wanted to make sure that the city understood our frustration because it seems like they’re prioritizing a demolition and a hundred-million-dollar contract instead of the lives of Chinese seniors”, said Christopher Marte, a city councilman.
In order to raise awareness about the prison’s harmful community effects, Marte co-founded Neighbors United Below Canal, a local advocacy organization.
Last year, residents including Marte noticed that demolition work done in preparation for the prison construction damaged a nearby senior center.
Reflecting on the complicated role of incarceration in Chinatown’s history, Kerri Culhane, an architectural historian, noted the neighborhood’s long opposition to controversial civic projects, including the original “Tombs” jail.
“The city has this conflict between promoting Chinatown as this important, authentic place, but at the same time doing everything it can to make it as hard as possible for local businesses”, she said.