City to send notorious jail barge to Louisiana in the coming days

The city is planning on sending its decommissioned jail barge to Louisiana in the coming days. AP file photo by Seth Wenig

By Jacob Kaye

Every time Lezandre Khadu drives into the Bronx, her heart sinks.

Without fail, she spots “The Boat,” the notorious jail barge where her son, Stephan Khadu, died.

“It’s a feeling that I get over my whole entire body,” she said. “It’s just rage to know that my son lost his life in that place, and I wasn't there with him. His family wasn’t there with him.”

But after fighting since her son’s 2021 death to get the city to shutter the barge, known as the Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center, Khadu expects to finally feel some form of closure in the coming days, when the city plans to send The Boat south to be turned into scrap metal.

“It’s bittersweet,” Khadu said. “It’s like a hatchet coming out of my heart. But the wound is still there.”

According to a newsletter sent by the New York City Economic Development Corporation obtained by the Eagle, the city planned on sending the jail barge from its home on Hunts Point’s shores to a Louisiana scrap metal facility on Saturday. However, an EDC spokesperson told the Eagle the farewell is dependent on weather conditions and that the Coast Guard told them late on Wednesday that the trip would have to be postponed several days.

It’s unclear when exactly the barge will leave the city, but the EDC spokesperson said they expect it to happen next week.

The city first brought the barge – which was also constructed in Louisiana – to the East River in 1992, as the city’s incarcerated population began to balloon and the jails on Rikers Island began to become overcrowded. In the 1990s, the jail’s population peaked at over 20,000 detainees, around three times as many people than are currently detained in the dangerous jail complex.

Over the years, the floating jail became a symbol of the city’s inability to reform its crumbling jail system, which a federal judge earlier this year ordered be put under a federal receivership. While detainees, lawyers, advocates, judges, correctional officers and others have claimed conditions across all Department of Correction jail facilities are poor, conditions on The Boat were, at times, described as being particularly bad.

Khadu’s son died on The Boat in 2021 after contracting meningitis. He was 24 years old.

The following year, 48-year-old detainee Gregory Acevedo died after he jumped off the side of the jail barge into the river.

Mayor Eric Adams, who has largely fought the city’s legal obligation to shut down the Rikers Island jail complex by 2027, decommissioned The Boat in 2023 as part of Rikers’ closure plan.

The city plans to create the Hunts Point Marine Terminal in its place, a site to move freight off of ships and onto their last mile in their delivery.

“As DOC modernizes and develops, we bid farewell to the retired Vernon C. Bain Center,” DOC Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie said in a statement in June, when the terminal was announced. “We look forward to a new vision for the community and are proud to do our part to facilitate this transfer. We also thank the many people who bravely served at the facility over the past three decades and who dedicated themselves to keeping our city and the people in our care safe.”

Khadu said that even as her fight to get the city to close Rikers Island’s jail complex for good continues, she’ll take some solace in seeing the barge drift away.

“My grandkids will never, ever see that place, and that makes me feel good,” she said. “I can tell them the story of how hard I fought, how many days and nights, freezing, feeling like my toes were going to break off, not knowing if this was going to actually work, or if anyone actually cared or was going to do something about it.”

“I can say all of that wasn’t just done in vain,” Khadu added. “Something happened. Something good came out of it.”