Cuomo would abandon borough jails and rebuild Rikers if elected
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Former Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Wednesday that he would keep Rikers Island open and abandon the city’s borough-based jail plan if elected. AP file photo by Yuki Iwamura
By Jacob Kaye
With the city facing major delays and ballooning costs to its plan to close Rikers Island, former Governor Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday that he would build new “state-of-the-art” jails on the island in lieu of the four borough-based jails currently being built, if he is elected mayor.
Cuomo, who was defeated in the Democratic primary earlier this year by Queens Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani and is now running an independent bid for mayor, said on Wednesday during a Crain’s New York Business mayoral forum that he would abandon the city’s legally-mandated plan to close Rikers by 2027 and replace it with new jails in Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx.
Instead, the former governor said he would begin a “phased rebuild” of the current jail complex where over 100 people have died in the past decade, replacing the old, crumbling structures with “new, modern, housing designed to promote rehabilitation, safety, and mental health,” according to a press release sent out by his campaign after the forum.
But ditching the city’s $16 billion effort to shutter Rikers and build new jails will not be simple.
Cuomo’s pitch faced immediate criticism on Wednesday from advocates and the City Council, whose support would be crucial to putting the former governor’s plan into action. Cuomo’s Rikers plan also flies in the face of the latest recommendations made earlier this year by the city’s Independent Rikers Commission, which said the city shouldn’t change the law requiring the 2027 closure, however off base it may now be, until they first create a detailed plan to put an end to the island’s use as a de facto penal colony.
Cuomo called the current effort to shutter the dangerous jail complex a “major debacle” that will one day be analogous to the “Big Dig” in Boston, a famously delayed and expensive highway project that took nearly two decades to complete.
“The writing is on the wall,” said Cuomo, who called the plan “unworkable” in 2019 when his longtime foe, Mayor Bill de Blasio, first introduced it.
While reconstructing the jail facilities on Rikers, Cuomo said he would also create a number of express bus routes from each of the boroughs to Rikers Island – supporters of the borough-based jails plan said the new jails would make it easier for families to visit detainees while they are awaiting trial.
The former governor said he would also convert the borough-based jail sites into housing or mixed-use developments, even as the facilities are currently under construction by the city. Brooklyn has already seen its jail, which is scheduled to be the first to open, rise to at least five of its eventual 15 stories. And the Queens site, which is located behind Queens Borough Hall and Queens Criminal Court in Kew Gardens, has been cleared for construction.
But while construction has begun at several of the sites, the effort to shut Rikers and open the new jails is running extremely behind. Brooklyn’s jail is currently on pace to open in 2029, at least a year and a half after the city is supposed to close Rikers. The jails in Queens and the Bronx aren’t expected to open until 2031 and the Manhattan jail likely won’t be completed until 2032, five years after the closure deadline.
Also standing in the way of Rikers’ closure is its population, which reached a 6-year high of 7,600 people in June. Altogether, the borough-based jails will be constructed to hold a total of 4,400 detainees.
In its March report, the Independent Rikers Commission said that despite the need, it seemed almost impossible for the city to figure out a way to close Rikers by the deadline it set in its 2019 law.
“It is unfortunately the case that despite the urgency to close Rikers in 2027, it is not a realistic deadline for closure right now,” Zachary Katznelson, the executive director of the Independent Rikers Commission, told the Eagle after the report was issued in March.
The site where Queens’ borough-based jail is set to be constructed. Eagle file photo by Jacob Kaye
While Cuomo cited a 2020 report from the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, which found that building new jails on Rikers would cost $300 million less than building in the boroughs, the Independent Rikers Commission came to a different conclusion in its 2025 report.
The commission claimed that rebuilding the jails on Rikers would likely take longer to build and cost between 8 and 15 percent more than building the borough facilities because of “necessary environmental remediation and landfill stabilization; the island’s isolation and single bridge on and off; and the presence of active jails, which would limit construction hours and require a staggered schedule to maintain sufficient capacity during construction.”
Delays to the current closure plan have mounted while Mayor Eric Adams, who was never fully supportive of the effort, has been in office.
Much of Adams’ management of the plan to close Rikers has been defined by clashes with the City Council, which has accused the mayor of dragging his feet on the plan, making it more and more difficult to close.
Cuomo would likely face a similar battle should he be elected and pursue the plan he pitched for the first time on Wednesday, a month before the election.
"This isn't a plan; it's a political scam with no basis in facts or reality,” Mandela Jones, a spokesperson for City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, said in a statement. “It would cost the city billions of dollars more and make our city less safe for all New Yorkers."
While Cuomo’s Rikers proposal generally aligns with the vision for the jails pitched by Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa, it varies greatly from the plan presented by Mamdani, the race’s frontrunner.
The Astoria lawmaker said that he plans to work to close Rikers and open the new jails as quickly as possible, if elected.
“What I would do from the very first day is make it my mission and my responsibility to comply with the law, to close Rikers and to decarcerate our jail population,” Mamdani told the Eagle in February after winning the primary.
While his tone has changed slightly in the months since, he said over the weekend that he remained committed to closing the jail complex.
“Part of closing Rikers Island is following through on the contractual obligations that the city has with the construction of these new jails,” Mamdani said Sunday, the Daily News reported. “That doesn’t preclude me from meeting with New Yorkers who have immense concerns about them, but it does ensure that the focus has to be on following that law.”
Mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo said this week that he would scrap the plan to shut Rikers and build new jail facilities there instead of building four borough-based jails, as mandated by city law. AP file photo by Julia Nikhinson
Rikers Island will likely prove to be a thorny issue for whoever is elected mayor.
Beyond the closure debacle, federal Judge Laura Swain is currently considering candidates to serve as the jail’s “remedial manager” and assume major management responsibilities over the jail complex in an effort to make it safer.
The remedial manager, who may well begin their tenure around the time the next mayor takes office, will be answerable only to Swain and will supplant the power of both the mayor and Department of Correction commissioner in some cases.
