Mayor casts doubt on plan to close Rikers
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Mayor Eric Adams said this week that the plan to close Rikers Island may need to be readjusted to account to increasing population numbers in the jail complex. Photo by Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office
By Jacob Kaye
Mayor Eric Adams suggested Monday that the city’s plan to close Rikers Island in the next five years may need some readjusting, an idea that angered criminal justice reform advocates and which also came several hours after three elected officials visited and decried conditions in the troubled jail complex.
Citing rising detainee population numbers, Adams said it may be time for the city to consider alternatives to the plan to close Rikers he inherited from former Mayor Bill de Blasio, and which is spelled out in a city law known as the Renewable Rikers Act.
His comments mark one of the first times that Adams, who has often criticized criminal justice reforms passed in the city and state prior to his election as mayor, has cast doubt on the city’s efforts to close the jail facility monitored by a federal authority and at risk of being turned over fully a federal receiver should conditions on Rikers not improve.
“We have to have a plan B, because those who have created plan A, that I inherited, obviously didn't think about a plan B,” Adams told reporters during an unrelated press conference. “If we don't drop down the prison population the way they thought we were, what do we do – no one answered that question.”
There are currently a little more than 5,000 people being held on Rikers Island, a vast majority of whom are being held pre-trial. The city’s borough-based jails – the alternatives to Rikers Island that are currently under construction – have been designed to hold around 3,000 incarcerated people in total.
“I believe we're 2,000 above the number of what we stated the count was going to be,” Adams said. “What do we do with them?”
“I need the folks that are idealistic to deal with the realism of this,” he added. “People are committing violent crimes.”
Admissions to Rikers Island were declining, at times rapidly, in the years preceding the pandemic. The first major spike in new admissions came between April and May of 2020, around two months after the pandemic began in New York. The number of new detainees hovered around 1,300 and 1,500 per month until the summer of 2021, when they slowly began to decline.
However, the number of new admissions again began to rise in the fall of last year and have continued rising each of the first eight months of Adams’ tenure.
There were more new admissions in July than there had been in any month dating back to February 2020, the month before the pandemic began, according to DOC data.
Reducing the population on Rikers is a major cornerstone of the city’s plan to close the jails and open four borough-based jails, including one in Kew Gardens.
Outlined in the Renewable Rikers Act, which was introduced in the City Council by former Queens lawmaker Costa Constantinides and signed into law by de Blasio in 2021, the borough-based jail plan centered around reducing the detained population, creating safer facilities and implementing new cultures within the jails by offering greater access to services to the incarcerated population.
The law also mandates the Department of Correction turn over an unused facility or piece of land to the Department of Citywide Administrative Services every six months until 2027, a timeline that began last summer.
The DOC missed its summer deadline to turn over a part of Rikers to DCAS in July, only the third deadline the agency had to meet. Around three months after the deadline, the city has yet to make good on its first of two scheduled 2022 transfers, a possible violation of the law.
“The law calls for the jails to be closed,” Adams said. “We're going to follow that law.”
Though Adams has said that he supports the plan to close Rikers, critics have accused the mayor of behaving otherwise.
Under the Adams administration, arrests made by the NYPD have increased, and the city’s plan to introduce the Risk Accountability Management System, an alternative to solitary confinement, has been indefinitely delayed. A dozen people have died in Department of Correction custody this year.
“The Mayor is deflecting responsibility for people being abused and killed in his jails, and for the rising jail population,” said Anisah Sabur, an organizer with the #HALTsolitary campaign. “The Mayor, along with district attorneys, judges, and state and local lawmakers, have control over how many people are in the jails. They can either invest in new and existing community resources that actually improve safety, or they can continue to treat our freedom as a political problem and try to hide us away behind bars.”
“The Mayor, in particular, has bullied the courts and lawmakers into increasing the jail population,” Sabur added. “Officials must release people and stop sending people to these deadly jails.”
Adams said Monday that critics of operations inside the jail, which is run by DOC Commissioner Louis Molina, have yet to present alternative solutions to a number of issues, including violent assaults and attacks committed by incarcerated people already behind bars.
“If the mission is, if someone commits a crime, we don't confine them, then they need to say that,” Adams said. “Say they don't believe anyone should ever go to jail for committing a predatory crime.”
Well over half of the current detained population is being held on murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, assault, rape, sexual assault or weapons charges, according to the DOC.
“If you are in jail and you commit a predatory crime on a staffer, a civilian, or another inmate, I want them to tell us what we should do with them,” Adams said. “Because I don't know what they want us to do with them.”
Adams’ comments came only a few hours after New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Willaims, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and City Councilmember Carlina Rivera paid an unannounced visit to the jail complex.
Despite noting “some concerns,” including conditions that resembled solitary confinement, the lawmakers said that, largely, conditions had improved on the island over the course of the past year.
“When I came here a year ago, it was simply atrocious – it looked like a jail that was on the brink of simple disaster,” Williams said. “I do want to say that while I think it's still not the safest place to be for anyone who's housed or who works there, I do want to just say it is demonstrably better.”
Rivera, who agreed with Williams about the state of the facilities, added that despite the improvements, the plan to move to the borough-based jails must continue.
“We are very concerned about ensuring that we remain on the timeline with closing Rikers Island,” Rivera said.
The sentiment was echoed by Lander, who recently released a data set tracking a number of pertinent issues on Rikers Island.
“Staying on the path to close Rikers is critical,” Lander said. “And I'm not confident that we're currently on it.”
All three elected officials also declined to comment on the ongoing legal case that could see Rikers Island be turned over to a federal receivership.
Earlier this year, federal Judge Laura Swain ordered the city and Steve J. Martin, the federal monitor appointed to oversee the agency, to craft an “action plan” to improve conditions in the facilities where over 30 people have died in the past two years.
Swain told the DOC and the city that they have until the fall to prove that they are not only sticking to the action plan, but that it’s working, or otherwise face the threat of a receivership, which could see a federal authority take full control over Rikers.
Adams has said in recent months that a receivership would be an indictment on his and his administration’s ability to run the city they were elected to run.
Rivera, Lander and Williams said Monday that while they have yet to take a position on the receivership, it should not be taken off the table.
Meanwhile, the borough-based jail program is well underway.
The construction of the garage that will soon be attached to the Kew Gardens jail facility, which will be built behind Queens Borough Hall and the Queens Criminal Courthouse, is largely completed and construction has recently begun on a community space that will also be part of the complex.
Also underway are preparations for demolishing the defunct Queens Detention Center.
The proposed 886-bed jail is expected to be completed by 2027, the year Rikers Island is mandated to be shuttered.
