Speaker Adams bashes mayor on plan to close Rikers
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City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams rallied alongside criminal justice advocates on Thursday to demand Mayor Eric Adams and his administration follow through on the city’s plan to close Rikers Island as a jail facility by 2027. Photo by John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit
By Jacob Kaye
Tensions over the closure of Rikers Island began to come to a boil on Thursday, several days after a proposed contract for the construction of Brooklyn’s borough-based jail would suggest the city is headed down a path that will see it miss the deadline to close the jail complex by at least two years.
Rallying in City Hall Park on Thursday, a number of criminal justice organizations and over a dozen members of the City Council, including Speaker Adrienne Adams, blasted Mayor Eric Adams and his administration for what they say is a lackadaisical approach to a dire public safety issue.
Thursday’s rally marked one of the first times Speaker Adams, whose late mother served as a corrections officer, directly called out the mayoral administration for its approach to closing Rikers Island. It perhaps is the strongest stance she’s taken against the mayor, who she attended high school with, since the pair took office.
“The inconsistent statements from the administration over the past few days have unacceptably created questions where there should be no questions,” the speaker said. “Rikers must close by 2027 and we cannot allow it to continue undermining public safety issues across our city.”
Earlier this week, the city issued a proposed $2.9 billion contract for the building of the Brooklyn borough-based jail – there will be four total built out across the city. The contract, which is the first to be proposed for any of the borough-based jails, is not set to expire for 2,317 days after its summer 2023 start date, or around two and a half years past the city’s 2027 deadline to close Rikers Island.
The contract was the latest in a growing series of signs that suggests the Adams administration’s belief that Rikers Island can close as a jail complex by its legally-mandated deadline is dubious at best.
Speaking at an unrelated press conference on Wednesday, the mayor defended the contract and said that should the city be required to move detainees into a partially completed jail in an effort to comply with the law, it would.
“We said it over and over again, and I’m going to continue to state it – we’re going to follow the law,” the mayor said. “The plan was flawed but we’re going to follow the law.”
“Because something is not completely finished does not mean that you can’t occupy inmates,” he added. “The law states 2027, that is the law that we’re going to follow. We’re going to follow the law.”
A spokesperson for the mayor told the Eagle earlier this week that while the contract extends into October 2029, a significant portion of the jail is expected to be completed by April 2029 – a date that would still fall over a year short of the city’s deadline.
Speaker Adams has ramped up her rhetoric over the jail’s closure in recent weeks. She dedicated the final moments of her State of the City speech to advocate for shuttering the jail on time, and began Thursday’s City Council meeting reiterating many of the same remarks.
Thursday’s rally, however, was one of the first times she’s directly and publicly attacked the Adams administration on their handling of their plan to shut the jail down.
“This council…will exercise its full authority and work with all stakeholders to help ensure the administration structures contracts to advance closure on time, fulfilling its obligation,” Speaker Adams said.
“The administration and all stakeholders must commit to the solutions that prevent crime, reduce the excessive jail population, make our jails safer and stop the revolving door,” she added. “The evidence is clear about what programs reduce recidivism and make us safer, but a passive approach that fails to deepen the city's use of them will not get us there.”
New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams also took direct aim at the mayor during Thursday’s rally.
“There should be no excuses to stall the plan, and we should be clear, the administration already said from the jump that they’re not even sure they agree with the plan,” Williams said. “So this seemed a little coincidental to find a reason to stall.”
“If you knew how dangerous Rikers is for everyone there, you should do everything possible to shut it down sooner than later,” he added.
One of the biggest impediments to closing Rikers Island on time is the jail’s current population.
Rikers Island currently has a daily average population of around 6,000 detainees. Several officials, including the mayor and Department of Correction Commissioner Louis Molina, have said that they expect that number to rise to 7,000 by the end of the year.
Combined, the borough-based jails will only be able to house 3,300 detainees, or around half the population that is currently being held on Rikers.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander said on Thursday that the Adams administration and the City Council needs to take action to begin to implement programs to reduce the population of the jail, where about half the detainees held there have been diagnosed with a mental illness.
“Everyone knows no one there is getting better while in detention at Rikers, so why are we not exploring the supportive housing, models of community-based mental health care that actually help people get better,” Lander said.
“We don't have to wait until 2029, we don't have to wait until 2027, we don’t have to wait until 2025 – in 2023, let’s start working to make sure that people who are detained on Rikers with mental illness instead get the supportive housing and the community-based mental health care they need,” he added.
According to the city’s current plan to close Rikers, the Brooklyn jail facility is to be the first to be opened. Queens’ facility, which will be located in Kew Gardens behind the Queens Criminal Courthouse, is expected to open shortly after the Brooklyn facility opens.
Construction contracts for the Queens facility have yet to be proposed. However, construction on the facility’s parking garage is nearly completed.
The City Council passed and former Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law legislation that mandates the closure of Rikers Island by August 2027 in 2021. Per the law, the island is required to reopen as a renewable energy hub.
But key benchmarks toward the jails closure have recently been missed.
The city is required to turn over a piece of land or an unused facility on Rikers Island every six months to the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, to get the transition to a renewable energy hub underway as soon as possible. The city has missed its last two deadlines.
The Rikers Island Advisory Committee, a group tasked with outlining the plan about what to do with Rikers once it closes as a jail complex, also has not met since last summer, THE CITY reported in February.
Additionally, Mayor Adams said recently that he has convened a group within his administration to begin discussing a “plan b” that would differ from the current plan to close the jail complex.
Three dozen people have died on Rikers Island dating back to the start of 2020. Last year, 19 people died in the complex or shortly after being released from it. The death toll was the highest in a decade.
