Brooklyn’s borough-based jail proposal expands by 150 beds
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The Brooklyn borough-based jail facility will be able to hold around 150 more detainees than originally expected, the city said on Wednesday. The growth comes at the expense of a number of “therapeutic beds.” Photo via the City of New York
By Jacob Kaye
Brooklyn’s borough-based jail facility, one of four facilities expected to replace Rikers Island before the end of the decade, will be larger than originally anticipated, the city revealed this week.
During a neighborhood advisory meeting held on Wednesday, the city’s Department of Correction, Department of Design and Construction and the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice revealed that the borough-based jail facility will include 1,040 beds for detainees, up from the 886 beds originally planned for the site.
Because the city is unable to physically increase the size of the jail to make way for the 154 beds, the Adams administration has decided to find the extra space by eliminating some of the jail’s planned “therapeutic beds,” or areas designated for detainees with mental illnesses or substance abuse issues. Around half of the population currently being detained on Rikers Island has been diagnosed with a mental illness. Gothamist was the first to report on the jail’s expansion and the elimination of the therapeutic beds.
In addition to the elimination of the therapeutic beds, the city also said it would eliminate half of the proposed parking spaces for the facility. The most recent plans show 100 parking spots instead of 200.
The jail’s expansion comes as the city continues to move further and further away from the maximum population the city’s four borough-based jails were originally planned to be able to hold. There are currently a little more than 6,000 New Yorkers being detained on Rikers Island per day, or a little less than double the 3,300 detainee population the borough-based jails are planned to be able to accommodate once built.
It’s not the first time this year that the proposed borough-based jail in Brooklyn – the first of the four to reach this stage of the planning process – has had its plans altered without much warning.
In March, the city’s Department of Design and Construction posted a public notice for what was then a proposed contract issued for the building of the Brooklyn jail facility that suggested the $2.9 billion project would not be completed until the fall of 2029, two years passed the city’s 2027 deadline to close Rikers. Despite pushback from advocates and lawmakers, the contract was approved by the mayor’s office.
A spokesperson for the mayor defended the jail’s expansion in a statement on Friday, blaming former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration for creating what they claim is an unworkable plan to close Rikers Island and replace it with the borough-based jails by 2027.
“With the city’s current jail population about twice the size of the system’s capacity under the borough-based jails plan, it has become painfully clear that the plan approved under the last administration leaves open serious questions about the city’s ability to keep New Yorkers safe,” a mayoral spokesperson said.
“The Adams administration’s decision to increase the number of beds in the Brooklyn jail reflects an honest accounting of the realities of the criminal justice system and public safety in our city, including maintaining critical services for those in custody,” the spokesperson added.
According to the spokesperson, the change in size was proposed following a review from city engineers and public safety officials within the Adams administration. The spokesperson also claimed that the expansion would speed up the timeline for the jail project that appears to already be years behind schedule.
According to the same Powerpoint presentation that revealed the additional 154 beds in the facility, the new date for completed construction is summer 2029, a target that is still two years after the city’s legally-mandated 2027 deadline.
A powerpoint presented to the brooklyn borough-based jail’s neighborhood advisory committee shows that while the addition of around 150 beds will speed up the construction timeline proposed earlier this year, the facility will still be completed two years after the city’s legally-mandated deadline to close rikers island. Graphic via the City of new york
“It is fully within the administration’s legal authority and will even accelerate the project’s timeline,” the spokesperson said. “This is what we must do to protect public safety, provide humane conditions for those in custody, and close the jails on Rikers Island – there is simply no other path forward.”
Since taking office, Mayor Eric Adams has frequently suggested that he doesn’t support the plan to close Rikers Island by 2027, which was passed by the City Council just before de Blasio left office.
Last August, when the city’s jails were holding around 5,000 people per day, Adams said that the city needs to “have a plan B, because those who have created plan A, that I inherited, obviously didn’t think about plan B.”
“If we don't drop down the prison population the way they thought we were, what do we do – no one answered that question,” he said at the time.
But criminal justice advocates and lawmakers in the City Council have criticized the mayor for what they say is his lack of commitment to take measures to reduce the population currently on Rikers Island.
The mayor has yet to make an appointment to the Local Conditional Release Commission, a commission created by the City Council that could reduce the number of detainees on Rikers Island by at least 100 per year. The commission has yet to release a single detainee or hear a single case because it is not fully staffed. Though the council appointed three members to the commission in December – around two years after the commission was first created – Adams has yet to make his appointments to the commission.
Advocates and lawmakers also say that Adams and his administration, including Department of Correction Commissioner Louis Molina, have not supported programs that would help lower the population on Rikers Island.
Darren Mack, the co-director of Freedom Agenda, called the administration's elimination of the therapeutic beds at the proposed Brooklyn facility “shameful and tragic.”
"Mayor Adams ran for office saying he would get Rikers closed, but has been doing everything in his power to fill it up with more and more people struggling with addiction, mental health needs, and unstable housing,” Mack said. “Now he's pointing to a jail population that is inflated because of his failed policies, and trying to use it to justify efforts to add more beds to the replacement borough jails.”
“This is a problem of his own making,” Mack added.
Megan French-Marcelin, the senior director of policy at the Legal Action Center, said in a statement that she felt it was “truly unconscionable that the city would add to the overall bed count of the planned Brooklyn borough jail while diminishing the therapeutic units."
“More than half the current Rikers population has a mental health disorder and yet Mayor Adams would, without public input, try to limit the very access to treatment that is needed,” French-Macelin said. “In the wake of three more deaths at Rikers and amid abuse and neglect so rampant that the Department of Justice has indicated that it will file for contempt against the City, Mayor Adams has found new ways to increase the vast web of our criminal legal system and its abuses.”
After declining for several years, Rikers’ population began to see an uptick in 2020. In April 2020, the jail saw an average daily population of around 4,000. By the end of the year, its average daily population had increased to 4,800.
When Adams first took office, the jail’s average daily population was around 5,300. In June, there were 6,044 people in the jail per day on average, the highest average population since December 2019.
