Days after commission issues plan to close Rikers, mayor charts his own path – with few details

Mayor Eric Adams on Thursday proposed building a facility dedicated to housing detainees with mental health issues. It’s unclear how the new facility would be incorporated into the city’s efforts to close Rikers and replace it with four borough-based jail facilities. File photo by Benny Polatseck/Mayoral Photography Office

By Jacob Kaye

Mayor Eric Adams spent the first three years of his mayorality largely ignoring the city’s original plan to shutter Rikers Island’s jails and replace them with four borough-based jails by 2027.

Now, two days after the commission charged with creating the original closure plan issued an updated proposal, Adams appears to have decided to neglect that one, as well.

Though major sections of the report from the Independent Rikers Commission issued Wednesday propose ways the city could address the over 50 percent of detainees with mental health issues, Adams said Thursday he had his own idea – albeit, one lacking details.

During an appearance on CBS alongside his new first deputy mayor, Randy Mastro, the mayor said he would task Mastro with building a jail facility solely dedicated to housing detainees with a mental health diagnosis.

The mayor’s proposal, which he has floated multiple times in recent months, seems to be in direct conflict with the recommendations to close Rikers from the commission, whose appointment was supported by the mayor in 2023.

“We have to be honest about those 51 percent that are dealing with mental health issues…and start talking about one of those jails, as I stated, turning it into a state-of-the-art mental health facility,” Adams said on CBS Thursday night.

The need is clear. The population of people with a mental health diagnosis has risen each year Adams has been in office and the percentage of people detained on Rikers with a serious mental health illness is higher so far in 2025 than any other year in the past decade. With the population on Rikers reaching a half-decade high of 7,000 detainees this month, around 3,600 have been diagnosed with a mental health issue, making Rikers the second-largest psychiatric institution in the country, according to the commission.

But as has been the case since the mayor first began pitching the mental health facility in December, Adams was scant on the details on Thursday.

The mayor wouldn’t say for sure whether the facility would replace one of the four borough-based jails or be built in addition to the new lock-ups. He also provided no information about how many people such a facility would accommodate, when it could be built or how its population would be determined. Adams also didn’t comment on the cost of a mental health facility – construction of the four borough-based jails, which have been significantly delayed under Adams’ management, are expected to cost taxpayers nearly $16 billion.

“That’s part of the conversation,” Adams said. “We are open to solving the problem. We are not going to dig into just one place and be closed minded.”

The Eagle asked the mayor’s office for more information about the proposal on Friday but did not receive a response by press time.

A plan on the table

While the mayor charts his own solution to the jails’ mental health crisis, he appears to be ignoring the one already on the table.

In its recent report, the Independent Rikers Commission recommended that on top of the 4,160 new jail beds and the approximately 360 secure hospital beds required for the new facilities, the city build an additional 500 secure psychiatric treatment beds in state health facilities or facilities near New York City.

“To provide necessary elasticity, flexibility to best distribute people across the system, and ensure people get the care they need in an appropriate setting, especially people charged with crimes who are so severely mentally ill that they cannot comprehend what is happening in court, 500 new secure psychiatric treatment beds – outside the jails – are necessary,” the report read.

Zachary Katznelson, the executive director of the commission, defended the 500-bed proposal in response to the mayor’s plan to build a new mental health facility on Friday.

"It's 100 percent true that when Rikers is the second largest psychiatric institution in the United States, our city urgently needs a different approach,” Katznelson said in a statement to the Eagle. “That's why the Independent Rikers Commission is calling for 500 additional secure psychiatric treatment beds – outside the jails, and ideally at a state facility – especially for the hundreds of people who pass through Rikers each year who are so severely mentally ill that they cannot even understand what is happening in court.”

Should Adams follow through on his proposal, it wouldn’t be the first time he’s resisted the commission’s recommendations.

In 2019, the city laid out plans to build three sets of outposted therapeutic housing beds, as per the commission’s suggestion. The units at Bellevue, Woodhull and North-Central Bronx Hospitals were originally anticipated to be completed by 2024. None have opened.

While construction of the first 100 beds at Bellevue was recently completed, the unit has yet to be staffed. During a recent City Council hearing, officials with the Department of Correction said they were unsure when the unit would be open to house detainees.

The units at Woodhull and North-Central Bronx are not expected to be ready until 2028.

The major delay to the outposited units “threaten[s] to keep some of the most ill people in Rikers distant from the specialized care they routinely need – and to continue to significantly burden jail-based staff with having to transport people back and forth to the hospital,” the commission said in its Wednesday report.

A spokesperson for City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said in a statement to the Eagle that instead of pursuing a new mental health facility, the mayor should focus on the ones already in the pipeline.

“The Independent Rikers Commission's report indicates that the city also needs a stronger mental health infrastructure, including new residential treatment capacity, but that it should be another part of the plan rather than a replacement of an existing part,” the Council spokesperson said. “If the mayor wants to strengthen the city’s mental health solutions now, he should prioritize opening the therapeutic housing beds at Bellevue, Woodhull, and North-Central Bronx hospitals, advocate for additional state psychiatric beds, and invest in community-based programs that he has underfunded. All of this can support people with mental health challenges and prevent them from languishing in city jails."

‘Not just lip service’

The delays to the therapeutic beds and the borough-based jails – all four jails aren’t expected to open until 2032 – have contributed to the commission’s central finding in its report: the city will be unable to close Rikers by the legally-mandated 2027 deadline.

“It is unfortunately the case that despite the urgency to close Rikers in 2027, it is not a realistic deadline for closure right now,” Katznelson told the Eagle on Wednesday.

Still, the commission made a number of recommendations that it said would speed up the process to close the jails and construct the new ones.

But in order for the city to kick the dangerous jail complex’s closure into gear, the commission said city leaders must “act urgently,” a change of pace from how the administration has handled the closure plan thus far.

The commission also recommended against pushing back the deadline by changing city law until officials in the mayor’s office and the City Council craft an actionable plan to close Rikers for good.

“That commitment, not just lip service, has to be made and has to be made now,” former Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, who chairs the commission, said during an interview on NY1 earlier this week. “That’s the only way you’re going to get some extension of that deadline. Otherwise, the city is going to be in a place where they are not following the law and the consequences might be quite drastic.”

City Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who chairs the Council’s Committee on Criminal Justice, told the Eagle on Friday that by proposing a mental health facility without providing much substance behind it, the mayor appears to be continuing to “kick the can down the road” when it comes to Rikers’ closure.

She also raised concerns over the fact that the mayor tapped Mastro to negotiate the details of the facility with the Council.

Before naming Mastro as first deputy mayor on Thursday, the mayor tapped the former prosecutor and aide to Mayor Rudy Giuliani to serve as the city’s top lawyer. However, after a bruising confirmation hearing before the Council during which lawmakers tore apart Mastro’s record and questioned his loyalties, Mastro withdrew his nomination for the prestigious gig.

In the several months since the hearing, it doesn’t appear Mastro’s relationship with the Council has markedly improved.

“[The mayor is] putting someone at the helm of a massive negotiation who was not able to win over support from the Council,” Nurse said. “I don't see [Adams] putting forward someone who is a good-faith collaborator with the Council, and so I don't think he's serious about closing Rikers, yet again.”

“He’s shown he hasn’t been serious the entire time,” she added.