Mayor makes vague pitch to turn borough-based jail into mental health treatment facility

New York City Mayor Eric Adams proposed turning one of the city’s proposed borough-based jails into a mental health treatment facility on Tuesday, Nov. 26, 2024. Photo by Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office

By Jacob Kaye

Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday pitched a vague plan to turn one of the city’s proposed – and extremely delayed – borough-based jail facilities into a mental health treatment jail, confusing advocates and lawmakers who say the mayor has thus far resisted calls to support treatment facilities and programs for detainees.

The mayor’s suggestion, a version of which he first floated on a radio show several days ago, comes around a week after a 51-year-old man with a history of mental illness and several stints in Rikers Island randomly stabbed three strangers to death in Manhattan.

Adams, who fielded questions about the incident from reporters during his weekly “off-topic” press conference on Tuesday, said turning one of the four borough-based jails into a mental health treatment facility would help prevent such tragedies from unfolding on the city’s streets in the future, though he didn’t explain exactly how.

His comments come weeks before a commission the mayor and City Council speaker jointly re-formed last year is expected to release its recommendations for closing Rikers Island by 2027, which are expected to include detailed guidelines for opening the four borough-based jails as well as mental health beds in the city’s jails and hospitals. It’s unclear whether the mayor’s proposed facility has at all been communicated to or considered by the commission, whose initial plan to close Rikers was largely ignored by Adams during his first several years in office.

“It's not logical to me to create four smaller Rikers,” Adams said on Tuesday. “One of those jails should be a state-of-the-art mental health facility where people can get real care.”

“It is criminal that we are incarcerating people with severe mental health illness,” he added. “And then they leave, and you see things like this happen.”

Ramon Rivera, who is accused of going on a stabbing spree on Nov. 18, was released from Rikers Island around a month before the alleged attacks for good behavior. While in the city’s troubled jail, he received treatment for his mental health and substance abuse issues before becoming unstable upon his release, the mayor claimed.

Rivera, who is currently being evaluated by doctors charged with determining if he is mentally fit to stand trial, was far from the only New Yorker with a mental illness to be held on Rikers Island this year.

Currently, around 51 percent of detainees on Rikers Island have been diagnosed with a mental health issue. Around half of those detainees have been diagnosed with a severe mental illness.

Initially, around 40 percent of the beds to be built in the four borough-based jails planned for Kew Gardens in Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx were to be designed to help treat detainees with mental health issues. However, Adams said in 2023 that because of the expanding population on Rikers Island, some of those beds would be cut back to make way for beds meant for detainees in general housing.

The number of therapeutic beds in the proposal dropped from around 1,400 to 800.

Adams, who inherited the city’s legally-mandated plan to close Rikers from former Mayor Bill de Blasio, also shrunk the number of outposted beds for detainees in need of treatment in the city’s hospitals from around 390 to around 360.

Advocates and lawmakers who spoke with the Eagle on Tuesday said that while Adams suggested he had a long history of calling for a new mental health treatment jail, they had not previously heard about the plan publicly or privately from the mayor.

“The mayor is flip flopping all over the place because he hasn't put the time aside to develop a coherent strategy for dealing with the root causes of what is happening on our streets,” said City Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who leads the Council’s Committee on Criminal Justice.

Nurse, who accused the mayor of consistently undermining the “mental health ecosystem and infrastructure of this city,” said that she felt there was a silver lining in the mayor’s sudden reversal.

“It's positive to hear the mayor finally own up to the need for a large-scale treatment facility,” Nurse said. “However it took you to get here, you're here. Let's work with that.”

“That's what we've been asking for, that's what we've been saying,” she added.

But what exactly Adams is suggesting isn’t exactly clear.

Though he appeared to be pitching a mental health jail facility on Tuesday, he made a similar proposal for a general psychiatric facility during a recent appearance on the Reset Talk Show in response to a question about the triple-stabbing on Friday. The facility he proposed on the radio show would house both detainees and non-justice-involved New Yorkers in need of treatment.

“One of those new jails needs to be a state-of-the-art psychiatric facility, not a jail, but a psychiatric facility where people can go and get treatment,” the mayor said on Friday. “Not only those who committed a criminal action, but those who have family members and loved ones where they're seeing the decline, the mental decline of their loved ones.”

It’s also unclear how feasible the proposal would be. Changing a jail to a mental health facility would result in the elimination of around 1,000 jail beds, which Adams has long said are already in short supply. Creating a mental health facility also may mean the borough-based jails project increases in cost, which Adams has also already criticized. Originally projected to cost around $8 billion, the four jails are now expected to cost the city over $15 billion.

The mayor’s office did not respond to the Eagle’s numerous questions regarding the mayor’s proposal, including questions about how it may or may not play into the anticipated release of the Independent Rikers Commission’s updated plan to close Rikers, which Adams commissioned a little over a year ago.

Zachary Katznelson, the executive director of the commission, did not confirm whether or not Adams’ proposal would be included in the commission’s final list of recommendations but said that “[c]losing the decrepit, dangerous jails on Rikers and expanding treatment capacity for people with serious mental illness are deeply intertwined, equally urgent goals.”

Last year, the commission released a report calling for the city to build at least 1,500 secure treatment beds in hospitals outside of Rikers.

“No one wins by having 1,400 people with serious mental illness locked up in Rikers, like we have today,” Katznelson said in a statement on Tuesday. “They don't get better long-term, nor is it fair to ask correction officers to take on that responsibility without adequate training or support.”

“All levels of government must come together to end waiting lists for community-based housing and care, and open additional inpatient and long-term psychiatric beds,” he added. “Our forthcoming blueprint will provide a path forward."

Darren Mack, the co-director of the criminal justice advocacy group Freedom Agenda, blasted the mayor for his 11th-hour pitch on Tuesday.

"New Yorkers have been consistently calling on the mayor to fund our city's mental health infrastructure to scale,” Mack said in a statement to the Eagle. “Instead he's let thousands of people sit on waitlists for housing and treatment, but now has an idea to basically recreate the asylums that were shut down decades ago, and conveniently impede closing Rikers in the process?”

“If the mayor wants to actually address mental health and safety in our city, he can follow through on the plan to close Rikers that was shaped by years of community input and work with mental health advocates on the dozens of evidence-based solutions they've proposed," Mack added.