Borough-based jail costs double to $16 billion, mayor claims
/
Mayor Eric Adams said on Wednesday in his executive budget proposal that the cost of building four borough-based jails to replace Rikers Island will be $16 billion, or double the original projections. Photo by Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office
By Jacob Kaye
The cost of replacing the crumbling jail complex on Rikers Island by building borough-based jails across the city has continued to balloon over the past year.
The total cost of constructing the four borough-based jails has effectively doubled since the plan was first introduced in 2019, the mayor said on Wednesday.
Though the city originally estimated the total cost of the project meant to ensure detainees are held in more humane conditions to be around $8 billion, last year, Mayor Eric Adams said that number had risen to $11.6 billion.
At the start of this year, City Hall said the construction costs had again risen to a little more than $15 billion.
But when Adams unveiled his executive budget proposal on Wednesday, he claimed the cost of building the four jails, including the one slated for Kew Gardens, had officially doubled, running a price tag of $16 billion.
“It has gone up in an unbelievable manner,” Adams said from City Hall on Wednesday.
Adams blamed the inflated cost on construction delays brought on by the pandemic, as well as several other unexpected hurdles the city has had to contend with, like a limited number of contractors available to build jail facilities.
“The additional dollar amount [in the executive budget] is really the adjustment on the cost of building the borough based jail,” the mayor said.
The ballooning cost is only the latest blow to the city’s plan to shutter Rikers Island by 2027 and replace it with the four borough-based jails.
Under Adams, who has never expressed full support for the plan created, in part, by his predecessor, the city has fallen years behind schedule to open the new facilities and close the infamous jail complex where over two dozen people have died since the mayor took office.
The first of the borough-based jails – the one planned for Brooklyn – isn’t expected to open its doors to detainees until 2029, two years after the legally-mandated deadline for Rikers to close.
And then there’s the question of the jail system’s population.
Though Adams added nearly 1,000 beds to the borough-based jail plan, there are, on average, around 2,000 more people being held on Rikers Island daily than would fit into the 4,400-capacity borough-based jails.
The number of people being held on Rikers has increased nearly every month since the start of the Adams administration. When the mayor first took office, there were around 5,300 detainees in the jail complex. As of March, there were just under 6,300 detainees, according to Department of Correction data.
Given the rising costs, backlog of missed deadlines and growing population of incarcerated New Yorkers, the mayor and the City Council last fall agreed to reconvene the Independent Rikers Commission, which crafted the plan to close Rikers nearly half a decade ago.
The reformed commission’s “goal is to lay out a refreshed blueprint of proven policies to help ensure the closure of Rikers, in the context of the changed realities of a post-COVID New York City and the law mandating closure by 2027,” an October press release from the City Council read.
The mayor said on Wednesday that he had recently met with City Council Speaker Adrinne Adams to discuss ways to lower the jail complex’s population.
Construction of the parking garage and community facility that will one day be part of Queens’ borough-based jail. Mayor Eric Adams said on Wednesday in his executive budget proposal that the cost of building four borough-based jails to replace Rikers Island will be $16 billion.Eagle file photo by Jacob Kaye
“All of us, we have the same mission of closing Rikers Island,” the mayor said. “But we thought it was imperative to bring our team in with the speaker’s team to show that…the four jails would not fit the current population.”
“So, we have to come up with a plan,” he added. “How are we going to deal with that new population? How do we get the jails built on the timetable that was set?”
City Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who chairs the Council’s Committee on Criminal Justice, said in a statement to the Eagle that the mayor's estimated cost of building with borough-based jails was a “concern and worrying.”
Nurse, alongside a number of other lawmakers and advocates, have accused the mayor of failing to make a concerted effort to both lower the jail population on Rikers, work toward the jail’s closure and facilitate the building of the new jails.
“The cost does not excuse the mayor from working to safely draw down the jail’s population and work with stakeholders in the legal system to remove bottlenecks,” Nurse said. “There is plenty he can be doing to improve the situation in our jails.”
Just as Adams’ $111 billion budget was being unveiled on Wednesday, Nurse was holding a hearing on the DOC’s process for reviewing grievances filed by detainees. The hearing was organized following the filing of over 700 cases in which detainees claimed they were sexually harassed and abused by guards and others while under DOC custody.
“Over 700 sexual assault allegations should be a clear signal that reducing violence at Rikers must be prioritized,” Nurse said.
Advocates have also said that the Adams administration has done little to fund efforts that may reduce the jail’s population and recidivism rates, an issue the mayor has blamed a bulk of the city’s crime on.
“The city is legally and morally obligated to close Rikers, and that includes allocating the funding needed to not just get the borough jails done on time but also scale up the community resources that will shrink the flow of people into Rikers,” Darren Mack, the co-director of advocacy organization Freedom Agenda, told the Eagle in a statement.
“The city is spending over half a million dollars per person per year to torture our neighbors in that hellscape,” Mack added. “Everyday that Rikers is open comes with unacceptable financial and human costs, and closing it on the fastest possible timeline should be a top priority for any mayor concerned with how city resources are spent."
