Mayor calls for new Rikers closure proposal as his administration fails to follow current plan

Mayor Eric Adams called for the City Council to craft a new plan to close Rikers Island during an event hosted by the New York Law School on Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2023. Photo by Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office

By Jacob Kaye

Mayor Eric Adams doubled down on his opposition to the plan to close Rikers Island on Tuesday and called on the City Council to craft a new proposal to close the city’s jail complex where over two dozen people have died since the mayor took office last year.

Speaking at an event hosted by the New York Law School on Tuesday morning, Adams kicked sand on the plan – which was put in place during former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s final year in office – to close Rikers Island by August 2027.

Adams also called on the City Council, whose members have been critical of the mayor’s adherence to the current plan, to come up with a new pathway toward closing the island where the death rate and rate of violence has surged in recent years.

Adams’ comments come almost four years to the day before the city is legally required to close down the jail complex and open up the island as a renewable energy hub. They also come as his administration has missed a series of deadlines and milestones associated with the plan – and done little to get the plan back on track.

However on Tuesday, said that the plan to close Rikers and open four borough-based jails, including one in Kew Gardens, was “flawed from the beginning” and lamented that there was no “plan B.”

Though the mayor has missed a number of deadlines associated with the laws surrounding Rikers’ closure and has publicly cast doubt on the plan since taking office, Adams pointed his finger toward the legislature and called on them to craft a plan that better suits the reality of the criminal justice system in New York under the Adams administration.

“We must sit down with the City Council and lay out the facts – ‘This is what is going to cost, here's how we could do this, you are partners, let's resolve this issue,’” Adams said, noting the jail’s rising population, which has grown by around 1,000 detainees since he took office.

The mayor also called on the City Council to craft a plan to address the approximately 3,000 detainees on Rikers – who account for about half of the jail complex’s population – who suffer from mental illness.

The mayor has largely been at odds with the council about Rikers Island since taking office in January 2022.

City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, whose mother served as a correctional officer, has been public about her support for the current plan to close the jail complex.

Though she has yet take any legal action against the mayor to force his compliance with the plan, she has frequently condemned him for his lack of support, including during her State of the City speech earlier this year.

A council spokesperson denounced the mayor’s comments on Tuesday in a statement to the Eagle.

“The law is clear that Rikers must close by 2027 and the Council remains committed to ensuring the city adheres to its legal mandate,” the spokesperson said. “The responsibility of every mayoral administration is to implement the laws and the plan to close Rikers is no different.”

“The mayor is correct that the population on Rikers is too large and unnecessarily, because roughly half of those detained have a mental health diagnosis and could be better served elsewhere,” the spokesperson added. “Successful implementation to close Rikers requires contributions from various stakeholders, including the Administration and courts. The Council remains a partner to achieve this outcome that will make New York City safer and will continue advancing solutions to realize it.”

A number of city councilmembers also separately condemned the mayor’s demands for a new plan, including Brooklyn Councilmember Lincoln Restler, who recently introduced legislation designed to lower the population on the island.

“The City Council already passed a plan to Close Rikers, but the Mayor is increasing incarceration in NYC as the horrors at Rikers worsen,” Restler said on social media.

“Time for Adams admin to invest in safely reducing [the] incarcerated population and fast tracking work to comply with law to close Rikers by 2027,” he added.

Under the mayor, the population on Rikers has surged, growing from around 5,350 detainees per day the month Adams took office to around 6,150 per day as of July, according to Department of Correction data. The jail complex’s current average daily population is around twice as large as what could fit into the city’s four borough-based jails, which are expected to house 3,300 detainees once built.

But their construction has also been called into question under Mayor Adams.

In March, the Department of Design and Construction proposed a contract between the city and a construction firm for the building of Brooklyn’s borough-based jail, the first of the four jails the city plans to complete. The contract would run through 2029, two years after Rikers is required by law to close.

More recently, the city said that it was amending the Brooklyn jail project and increasing the number of detainees it will house by around 150. In order to make space for the additional beds, the Adams administration proposed eliminating space in the jail’s “therapeutic” areas, or areas designated for detainees with mental illnesses or substance abuse issues.

No other contracts for the city’s three other future jails have been proposed, calling into question the city’s ability to build any new jail before the summer of 2027.

During his remarks on Tuesday, the mayor also blamed the city’s courts for failing to process cases, contributing to Rikers’ growing population – Department of Correction Commissioner Louis Molina recently said that he believes the population will hit 7,000 by 2024.

“The system is bottlenecked – we can't get people through the system,” the mayor said.

“We need to think about how do you modernize the system so that number one, victims are not waiting to find out and get closure to their lives, and two, those who are not guilty of a crime are not sitting on Rikers,” he added.

Lucian Chalfen, a spokesperson for the Office of Court Administration, rejected the characterization that the courts were to blame for the jail’s population numbers.

“To the extent that DOC indicated that the Courts are causing delays because it takes too long to bring these cases to resolution, the Court commences trials when both sides - prosecution and defense – are ready for trial,” Chalfen said.

“Judges are often waiting to try any case that is ready and the Courts do not turn away cases where both sides are ready to go,” he added. “Cases are delayed because either the prosecution or the defense is contending that they are not ready to begin the trial.”

But for Adams’ own part, the mayor’s administration has missed a series of deadlines baked into the 2021 plan to close Rikers.

As reported by the Eagle last week, the Department of Correction this summer missed its third consecutive deadline to turn over an unused parcel of land or jail facility to the Department of Citywide Administrative Services. The transfers, which began during the last year of the de Blasio administration but have not continued since Adams took office, are designed to speed up the process for turning the island into a renewable energy hub.

Though the mayor and Department of Correction Commissioner Louis Molina have said that Rikers’ ballooning population has made it so there are no vacant areas to transfer, several city councilmembers who have recently toured the jail complex told the Eagle that they witnessed unused areas on Rikers and were told by the DOC that they exist.

Some lawmakers and advocates have accused the Adams administration of purposefully missing the deadlines as an expression of his disapproval of the plan to close Rikers.

In a statement issued on Tuesday, the Campaign to Close Rikers, a coalition of advocacy organizations, faith leaders, community groups, service providers, formerly incarcerated individuals and others, said Adams’ remarks were “as disingenuous as the actions he proposes are immoral.”

“We reject the mayor’s callous response to the humanitarian crisis on Rikers and demand that the administration take the necessary, and very tangible steps, to meet this deadline and save lives in the process,” they said.

“With his statement this morning, the Mayor ignores recommendations from his own “Blueprint for Community Safety” as well as the countless empirically-validated proposals from advocates and elected officials that would, if deployed, reduce the New York City jail population and improve community safety,” they added. “The Mayor cannot and should not continue to pursue policies that condemn more people to suffer and die on Rikers Island, and seek to extend the existence of this human rights disaster. He must do everything necessary to fulfill his obligation to the people of New York to shutter Rikers once and for all.”

Regardless of the mayor’s reluctance to follow the plan to close Rikers, the plan to shutter the jail could potentially be made moot by a federal judge currently weighing whether or not the jail should be stripped from the city and handed over to a federal receiver.

U.S. Southern District Court Chief Judge Laura Swain earlier this month told the Legal Aid Society, which represents the plaintiff class in the ongoing civil rights case known as Nunez v. the City of New York, that they could bring contempt proceedings claiming that the DOC has failed to improve conditions for detainees on Rikers in nearly 10 years since a consent judgment stemming from the case has been in place. Swain also has allowed the attorneys to request receivership as a remedy.

Though she noted the extreme nature of such a request during the August conference, Swain said the consequences of not considering receivership were too high.

“Turning Rikers around has never presented an easy task,” Swain said during the Aug. 10 hearing. “Although some progress is being made, it's not being made at a rate that is commensurate with the perils that are being presented.”

“The people incarcerated at Rikers are at a grave risk of immediate harm,” the judge added.

In all, 27 people have died while in DOC custody since Adams took office and 43 people have died dating back to 2021, the year a number of ongoing crises on Rikers began to come to a head.