Oversight board urges city to ‘recommit’ to Rikers closure plan
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The Board of Correction last week issued a report calling on the city to “recommit” to its plan to close Rikers Island and open four new borough-based jail facilities by 2027. Eagle file photo by Jacob Kaye
By Jacob Kaye
The watchdog group charged with keeping tabs on New York City’s jails says that the city needs to “recommit” to its plan to shutter Rikers Island, which has seen its average daily population grow by nearly 1,000 detainees in the past two years.
In a four-page report released quietly last week, the Board of Correction said that while the city has made serious strides toward closing Rikers Island, recent trends suggest the city needs to refocus its efforts on reducing the infamous jail’s population and building the four new jails in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan to replace Rikers by 2027, the city’s legally-mandated deadline for the jail’s closure.
In the BOC’s report, the citizen oversight board celebrated that the jail complex’s average daily population had been reduced by around 4,800 detainees since 2017, the first year the city committed to closing Rikers Island. But after declining for years, Rikers’ population has been steadily increasing since May 2020, a trend city officials have said they only expect to continue.
That could pose a major problem for the city’s borough-based jails plan.
Altogether, the city’s borough-based jails are expected to be able to detain 3,300 people at a time. As of September, there were around 6,200 people being held in the city’s jail complex, according to Department of Correction data.
“We are encouraged by the city’s progress in reducing the jail population from nearly 11,000 in 2017 to less than 6,200 in August 2023,” the Board of Correction said in its status report on the city’s jail closure plan. “However, we strongly urge all stakeholders to recommit to reducing the jail population safely, to less than half of the current population, which would bring it below the borough-based jails plan’s maximum capacity of 3,300 people.”
“Conditions are dire on Rikers Island and change is needed soon,” the board added.
Both Mayor Eric Adams and Department of Correction Commissioner Louis Molina, who recently has had to deny rumors that he is planning to resign from his post later this month, have said that they don’t believe the city will be able to close Rikers Island by August 2027, citing its growing population. Both the mayor and the commissioner have also publicly questioned the plan to replace Rikers Island with the four borough-based jails.
In recent months, Molina and Adams have said they expect Rikers Island’s average daily population to hit 7,000 at some point in 2024.
While the BOC refrained from pointing the finger at any one person or governmental body in its report, advocates and lawmakers have in recent months accused Adams and Molina of flouting the closure plan.
On Tuesday, advocates told the Eagle that they believe the BOC’s demand for a refocusing on the city’s plan to close Rikers is directed at Adams.
“We see this as a statement that the mayor needs to get in gear,” said John Proctor, a spokesperson for Freedom Agenda.
Sarita Daftary, the co-director of Freedom Agenda, blamed the mayor and his administration’s policies – including the NYPD’s recent increase in issuing criminal summonses and budget cuts that have led to the elimination of social services intended to keep people out of the criminal justice system – for Rikers’ ballooning population.
“There's all these ways that he's creating pressure in the wrong direction around incarceration,” Daftary said.
City Councilmember Carlina Rivera, who chairs the council’s Committee on Criminal Justice, told the Eagle on Tuesday that “the City Council remains committed as a stakeholder to the closure plan and to reducing the jail population safely.”
“The administration bears the burden of demonstrating that they've marshaled every possible resource to keep the plan to have a just transition on track,” Rivera said. “Mayor Adams really has not shown a commitment to that.”
“The whole plan is very big, it's very complicated, but it is imperative that it can be done,” Rivera added.
The mayor’s office did not respond to the Eagle’s request for comment on Tuesday.
Since Adams took office at the start of 2022, the city has missed a number of milestones baked into the city’s plan to close Rikers Island – the laws governing the jail’s closure were passed at various times by the City Council from 2019 through 2021.
Among the laws detailing Rikers’ closure is the Renewable Rikers Act, which requires that the city explore re-opening Rikers Island as a renewable energy hub once the jail complex is closed for good. To get the hub up and running as soon as possible, the law requires that the DOC transfer unused land or facilities – should they exist – to the Department of Citywide Administrative Services every six months until August 2027, the time by which the entire island should be transferred over.
In the final year of former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, the DOC transferred ownership of a vacant parcel of land and one of its nearly one dozen jail facilities to DCAS. However those first two completed transfers have been the city’s last.
Earlier this summer, Adams and the DOC missed their third consecutive deadline to transfer over an unused piece of land or jail facility to DCAS. The Adams administration has yet to complete a single transfer since Adams took office in January 2022.
The Adams administration has claimed that they have been unable to make the transfers because there have not been any vacant facilities or parcels of land available. However, a number of lawmakers and advocates have questioned the city’s claim.
City Councilmember Robert Holden, who opposes the plan to close Rikers, said in August that he saw empty facilities and unused land during a visit alongside members of the council’s “Common Sense Caucus.”
“It’s a huge island with empty buildings,” Holden said.
A group of councilmembers on the City Council’s Committee on Environmental Protection, Resiliency and Waterfronts also made a visit to the island over the summer and said that they were told by DOC officials that there were parcels of land on the island that were not in use by DOC.
The DOC itself has announced the closure of a number of facilities in recent months. However, the agency has held on to the buildings, citing a potential need to use them in the future as Rikers’ population increases.
In 2018, the DOC removed detainees from the George Motchan Detention Center on Rikers Island but has not transferred the building over to DCAS – it’s currently used as a training academy annex, according to the DOC.
In June 2022, the department also removed detainees from the Otis Bantum Correctional Center but did not transfer the facility to DCAS. In July 2023, DOC began to close the Anna M. Kross Center and transfer detainees back to OBCC.
“At this juncture, it is unclear whether DOC intends to reopen AMKC in the future,” the BOC said in its report last week.
In all, the DOC currently has seven jails in operation on Rikers Island, as well as the Vernon C. Bain Center, the floating jail barge known as The Boat – the department said it intended to transfer detainees off of VCBC by the end of October.
But as the city attempts to close facilities on Rikers, it remains unclear whether there will be new facilities to house them by 2027.
Though the Brooklyn borough jail is expected to open before the other three borough-based jails, it currently is not on track to open until 2029, two years after the city’s legally-mandated deadline to close Rikers.
Though the Brooklyn facility is currently in the design phase, “the remaining three borough jails [are] still in the procurement phase of the project,” according to the BOC’s report.
