For decades, the unfixable Rikers Island has hurt New Yorkers — those inside the massive complex’s walls and all of us beyond them. Under city law, the Mamdani administration must produce a plan to close Rikers by May 1. Fortunately, the planning to end the scourge of Rikers has already been done. The Independent Rikers Commission last year released a data-driven, actionable Blueprint to close Rikers. Now, the administration needs only to adopt that comprehensive Blueprint and implement it.
Mayor Mamdani understands the deadly seriousness of the task ahead. His appointments of Correction Commissioner Stanley Richards (an Independent Rikers Commission member) and Borough-Based Jails Czar Dana Kaplan (a senior advisor to the commission) mean we have essential leadership in place, something absent under the prior administration.
Indeed, the constellation of leaders across the board provide a once-in-a-generation opportunity to increase safety and improve outcomes. That includes a federally-appointed Remediation Manager focused on reducing jail violence, Chief Judge Rowan Wilson and a state court executive team dedicated to speeding up criminal cases, and a governor and City Council who have invested in treating serious mental illness and in supports when people return from Rikers to our communities.
The recent opening of secure treatment beds at Bellevue Hospital show how leadership makes all the difference. Those beds sat empty for 15 months, while the most ill people on Rikers lay in a garage converted into an infirmary. But Mamdani’s City Hall made opening Bellevue a priority and now we have a bricks-and-mortar example of a post-Rikers future.
Officers and detainees alike have marveled at Bellevue’s natural light, open yet secure spaces, and access to services. They are also thrilled to be somewhere which, unlike Rikers, isn’t falling apart around them.
By any rational examination, there are more people on Rikers than need to be for public safety. With 85% of the population being held pretrial, the longer cases take, the more artificially inflated the population gets. Today, 1,400 people on Rikers have been waiting more than a year pre-trial, including 500 who’ve been waiting more than two years.
If we reasonably speed up cases, up to 2,000 fewer people will be in jail on a given day. There will be zero harm to public safety. The accused and victims will both just get a resolution sooner. Thankfully, the state courts’ leadership is working hard to expedite cases on their end. City-funded agencies have to step up.
There’s also the ugly reality that Rikers holds more people with serious mental illness than any psychiatric hospital in America. Yet, very few Rikers staff have specialized training. One outcome: DOC reports 92% of incidents on Rikers, from fights to fires to force used by officers involve people with mental illness.
Then, after people are released, we miss a golden opportunity: last year more than 1,000 homeless people with serious mental illness on Rikers were approved for supportive housing (permanent housing with wrap-around services). Only 14 were placed, despite more than 4,000 vacant units citywide. No wonder almost half of people with mental illness are back on Rikers within a year. Get those people the care they need, in the right facilities (not Rikers!), and jail violence — and ultimately crime — will drop.
Replacing Rikers with something much better, as laid out in our Blueprint, is more than a policy issue. It is a moral reckoning, and a legal obligation. All New Yorkers, and crime victims in particular, deserve an end to the status quo.
Lippman, a former New York State chief judge, is chair of the Independent Rikers Commission.