Mayor claims borough-based jails can’t be built by Rikers’ closure deadline
/By Jacob Kaye
Repeating what top members of his administration have begun to suggest in recent weeks, Mayor Eric Adams said on Tuesday that his administration has little to no shot of building four borough-based jails by the time Rikers Island is legally-mandated to shutter as a jail complex in around three years.
Speaking to reporters during his weekly “off-topic” media availability, Adams, who has long questioned the plan to close Rikers Island passed into law shortly before he took office, defended comments made by his budget director, Jacques Jiha, during a City Council budget hearing last week. At the hearing, Jiha said that the ballooning costs of the borough-based jails, which are intended to replace the jails on Rikers Island by the time of its closure in August 2027, have made not only the jails difficult to pay for, but other city capital projects, as well.
Jiha also confidently said that he doesn’t believe the new facilities will be ready by the time Rikers is closed – “We know it’s not going to happen by 2027,” he said.
Beyond construction of the new facilities, there is also the question of space. Combined, the borough-based jails are expected to hold around 4,400 detainees and there are currently over 6,000 detainees being held on Rikers. Additionally, criminal justice advocates and members of the City Council have accused the Adams administration of failing to implement policies that would likely lower the jail’s population, sabotaging the plan the mayor claims is out of his control.
On Tuesday, Adams, and others in his administration, repeated Jiha’s claim, and said that the closure of Rikers Island and the creation of the new jail complexes is completely up in the air just over three years out from the looming deadline.
As he has said previously, the mayor also claimed that his administration would “follow the law” and close Rikers by the deadline, even if that means letting people out of jail.
“Either we're going to as a city say, ‘It's okay that we allow people out of jail who are violent,’” Adams said. “If that's what the city wants, I'm going to follow the law. That's all I'm going to do.”
“If the law calls for me by 2027, come hell or high water, Rikers is closed,” he added. “Whatever happens to the population we have to figure out what is done.”
The plan to close Rikers, build the borough-based jails and build a renewable energy hub on the site of the former jail complex has largely come to a halt since Adams, who inherited the plan passed under his predecessor, took office.
The mayor’s administration has missed crucial deadlines associated with the plan and has generally questioned whether or not the closure plan is feasible – on Tuesday, he called it “not a well-thought out plan.”
In March 2023, 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.
No other borough-based jail has even begun to go through the construction contract phase.
The mayor has said that due to the pandemic, the timeline for building the jails has been pushed back and the price of building them has exploded – the administration claims that what was originally an $8 billion project is now a $15.5 billion project.
The administration also recently tacked on around 1,000 more beds in the borough-based jails claiming that the original plan to build only 3,300 beds wouldn’t be enough.
In October, the mayor and City Council announced that together they had reconvened the Lippman Commission, which was originally tasked with mapping out the plan to close Rikers.
Though the new iteration of the commission has yet to make its updated recommendations, Adams said on Tuesday that his administration has “been engaging in conversation” with members of the commission.