Council calls on mayor to reverse Queens jail expansion
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The parking garage and community center set to be attached to the Kew Gardens borough-based jail facility are currently under construction. In a letter this week, 15 councilmembers called on the mayor to reduce the planned expansion of the women’s facility inside the yet-to-be-built jail. Eagle file photo by Jacob Kaye
By Jacob Kaye
A group of over a dozen city councilmembers this week called on the Adams administration to reverse its decision to up the number of beds in Queens’ yet-to-be-built borough-based jail facility.
Led by City Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who chairs the council’s Committee on Criminal Justice, 15 women councilmembers demanded in a letter to Mayor Eric Adams that his administration “cancel plans to expand the number of beds for women and gender-expansive people in the proposed” borough-based jail in Queens, which will one day be located in Kew Gardens.
The Kew Gardens facility is one of four borough-based jail facilities in the five boroughs set to replace Rikers Island, which the city is currently mandated by law to close by 2027. However, the future of the closure plan and the plan to build the borough-based facilities has been called into doubt by the mayor, who says the city’s jail population has grown too large to fit into the current plan. Adams and the City Council jointly last fall ordered the reformation of the commission called upon to craft the Rikers closure plan half a decade ago to potentially draft a new path toward the troubled jail complex’s closure.
Originally, each of the borough-based jail facilities were planned to house 886 detainees, totaling 3,300 beds. But with Rikers’ population steadily increasing to over 6,200 detainees in the past two years under Adams, the mayor claims more space will be needed to house the city’s detainees.
His administration recently announced that each of the borough-based jail facilities will see an increase in population, including the Kew Gardens facility, which is planned to be the centralized facility for women in custody.
Originally, the Queens jail was planned to have 125 beds for women and gender-expansive detainees – it will now be built with the capacity to hold 450 people.
But the councilmembers, which include Queens Councilemembers Tiffany Cabán, Nantasha Williams, Julie Won and Jennifer Gutierrez, said in their letter that building the women’s facility out is not only unnecessary but dangerous.
“[I]t is urgent that we prioritize reducing the number of women in custody now and revert back to the originally planned 126 beds at Kew Gardens,” the councilmembers said in their letter.
“We have the means to reduce our jail population and to do so is a moral and practical imperative as we chart the course for the borough jails,” they added. “There is no reasonable justification – practical, fiscal, or humanitarian – for the city to more than triple its planned incarceration of women and gender-expansive people.”
According to the lawmakers, women are often arrested and placed into custody “unjustly,” including instances in which they are attempting to defend themselves against intimate partner violence. Nearly half of all women detainees are survivors of domestic or sexual violence, according to the councilmembers.
They also claimed women and gender-expansive people are at particular risk of harm at the already dangerous jail where over two dozen people have died in the past two years.
Last fall, over 700 allegations of sexual assault against women in the city’s jails were made through the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that opened a window for victims of sexual violence to file lawsuits against their alleged abuser.
Around 59 percent of all Adult Survivors Act suits filed named the Department of Correction as a defendant, according to analysis published by Gothamist.
According to the DOC, the agency has attempted to institute a number of changes in an effort to better track and respond to claims of sexual violence against both detainees and correctional officers.
The City Council is expected to hold a hearing on how the agency responds to claims of rape and other forms of sexual violence in the coming weeks.
In a statement to the Eagle, a City Hall spokesperson defended the city’s expansion of the women’s facility at Kew Gardens.
“With the city’s current jail population about twice the size of the system’s capacity under the borough-based jails plan, it is painfully clear that the plan approved under the last administration leaves open serious questions about the city’s ability to keep New Yorkers safe,” the spokesperson said.
“The revised number of beds in each of the four facilities 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. “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.”
But advocates and lawmakers say that the Adams administration has made little effort to reduce the number of people incarcerated in New York City.
Under Adams, arrests have gone up, as have the issuance of criminal summonses. Programming on Rikers Island aimed at cutting back at recidivism has been cut – only to be partially restored months later. Early release programs have been stalled or put on hold. Additionally, the administration has missed a number of deadlines laid out in the city’s plan to close Rikers.
Also, the borough-based jail program has seen tremendous delays. Only one of the facilities – the jail to be built in Brooklyn – has gone through the city’s contracting system. Still, the Brooklyn facility isn’t expected to be completed until 2029, two years after Rikers is set to close.
Advocates say that rather than expand the number of beds, the city should be working to provide treatment to those being sent to Rikers, where around half the population has been diagnosed with a mental illness.
“We're looking to expand the beds based on how you are locking people up, versus really assessing people's needs, and then taking it from there,” Rev. Sharon White-Harrigan, the executive director of the Women’s Community Justice Association, told the Eagle during a recent interview. “The mayor stated this himself – if we were to take those who that have mental health concerns, those with addictions off of the island, that would be half the population right there.”
The Women’s Community Justice Association previously created a plan to get the number of women and gender-expansive people in the city’s custody below 100. In their letter, the councilmembers called on the mayor to refer to that plan, which was created alongside the Independent Rikers Commission, the Center for Court Innovation and John Jay’s Data Collaborative for Justice.
“The steps were viable and backed by decades of data, but to date we have not seen a concerted effort to implement any of the report’s recommendations, only plans to grow the number of women in detention,” the councilmembers said.
There are currently around 360 people being held in the women’s facility on Rikers Island, known as the Rose M. Singer Center, or Rosie’s. The population there has grown by over 50 percent since Adams took office – Rikers’ overall population has grown by around 17 percent in the same time period, according to DOC data.
