A year from now, Rikers Island will still be open, despite a 2019 City Council law mandating that the jail be closed by Aug. 31, 2027. The deadline will be missed. The law will be broken. That law must be amended before then.
It was a reasonable enough target once upon a time, but the year after the law was passed saw a global pandemic that shut down society and saw crime jump up significantly. But the city itself is not absolved of all fault; siting the four borough-based jails (a responsibility that Staten Island for some reason was allowed to wriggle out of) took an eternity, with city officials too deferential to predictable local opposition.
None of these facilities designed to replace Rikers are slated to be completed, not only by next year, but for a couple of years after that. The last, in Manhattan, is not expected to come online until 2032, five full years after the closure is ostensibly mandated. We wouldn’t want the city to rush construction anyway, and end up with shoddy jails that would soon suffer from the sort of infrastructural problems that plague Rikers.
And without new jails, Rikers must remain in business.
Even when the new lockups are done, they won’t be able to handle the current population of detainees awaiting trial.
Rather than keep the law as is and then simply violate it, the City Council and Mayor Mamdani must revisit this issue and set a new date that is realistic. This should not be read as a marker that the closure can be indefinitely delayed or that the city is free to just ignore the deadlines imposed by law; it is an acknowledgement that, at this stage, the original deadline set in 2019 is impossible to meet and there needs to be one that the city can actually strive towards.
It will also mean that the population held at Rikers will have to be able to go to the borough-based jails, i.e. it will have to be slimmed down by just under half to meet the capacity of those jails. To make it all work, we need more beds or fewer bodies for those beds. To reduce the headcount will require other investments, into mental health services, for example.
Part of Rikers’ shortcomings have to do with its remoteness and the deterioration of its facilities, but the other part — the culture and management of the Department of Correction — could easily be ported to the new jails.
Things got to be this bad in part because there was no real disincentive; for years, even decades, everyone from individual officers to uniformed leadership to departmental administration knew that negligence and mismanagement would go unpunished, that city leaders were more interested in obscuring rather than fixing systemic problems and that the main imperative was to keep the union happy.
The CO union had too strong a role in running the Island. Meanwhile, posts went unmanned, staff did not properly evaluate or treat health conditions and violence percolated. It is now the responsibility of federal court-appointed Remediation Manager Nicholas Deml to address these issues, and he should get full cooperation from the city. Otherwise, closing Rikers will be only a partial fix.