Rikers oversight nominee warns city needs contingency plans if jail population stays high

Martha King, a nominee for the Board of Correction, testified before the City Council on Monday, Nov. 9, 2026. Screenshot via City Council/YouTube

By Jacob Kaye

The former executive director of the Board of Correction and current nominee for the oversight body told lawmakers on Monday that the city should come up with some backup plans to close Rikers Island in case it is unable to lower the jail’s population to a size that will fit in the borough-based jails.

Martha King, who is being considered for a spot on the Board of Correction, told the City Council during a nomination hearing that she believed it was a “huge concern” that the city may be unable to bring its incarcerated population down to 4,400 people, the capacity of the borough-based jails scheduled to open in the next half decade. There are currently around 6,600 people behind bars on Rikers, a figure that has largely remained unchanged over the past year.

King, who previously served as the executive director of the BOC, said City Hall should begin to develop ideas to address the population issue.

“I think we should start planning now,” King told lawmakers on Monday. “We need to have a bunch of contingency plans for whether or not we can meet that goal.”

The city is currently running years behind its plan to close Rikers Island’s jail complex, which is supposed to be shuttered by August 2027, under a city law that the City Council is actively working to alter, the Eagle reported in September.

The first of the four borough-based facilities set to replace the jails isn’t scheduled to be completed until 2029, while the remaining three aren’t expected to open until at least 2032. But beyond the construction timeline of the new jails, the city is facing a population problem.

The borough-based facilities were designed to hold far fewer people than the Rikers Island complex, but the city has thus far been unable to consistently reduce the population locked up behind bars.

Though Rikers’ population reached a modern-day low in 2020, when the pandemic forced the population to drop to an average of 4,600, it has grown every year since.

In 2025, the average incarcerated population over the course of the year was nearly 7,200 people. The average population in 2026 is currently around 6,670 people, according to city data. But the population has remained stagnant compared with the number of people behind bars last November.

Though city officials have long admitted they will be unable to close Rikers by 2027, they have yet to present an alternative plan to shutting the jail complex. A City Council law required the mayor’s office to present its Rikers closure plan by May, a deadline it did not meet.

King said on Monday that there were two groups of people incarcerated on Rikers that the city should prioritize moving off the island – those whose cases have been pending for years and those with severe mental illness.

The longtime criminal justice reformer said the city “needs to work very closely with the court system on speeding up case processing.”

Over 500 pre-trial detainees on Rikers have been waiting for their trial to begin for two or more years. Around 200 of those have been waiting for more than three years.

In June, Chief Administrative Judge Joseph Zayas, the second-highest ranking official in New York’s court system, said that in recent years the courts have begun to move cases more quickly, but that a number of entrenched obstacles has made even quicker case processing difficult to achieve.

Zayas said that a “myriad of challenges” stand in the way of speeding up cases to the clip necessary to significantly reduce the number of people in the dangerous jail complex, where over 100 people have died in the past decade.

Prosecutors’ inability to turn over evidence quickly, a diminished number of beds for defendants with mental health issues, and private defense attorneys with large client lists are all standing in the way of reducing the time from a defendant’s arrest to the conclusion of their case, Zayas said over the summer. While the court system has made a number of changes that resulted in an increase in the number of dispositions last year, stakeholders from across the criminal justice system will need to reform their practices to make a significant dent in Rikers’ population, according to the chief judge.

“The bottom line is this: improving case processing efficiency in high-volume courts is not easy,” Zayas said in June. “It truly requires an all-hands-on-deck approach.”

Similarly, the city has been unable to meaningfully reduce the number of detainees with severe mental illness, which currently make up around 20 percent of the jail population.

“That's unprecedented,” King said. “And the numbers have just been going up.”

“We need a focused plan with the courts and to have other options for people with serious mental illness who are not being served well by being in a jail,” she added. “That's where I would focus.”

Earlier this year, Mayor Zohran Mamdani opened a long-stalled outposted therapeutic housing unit at Bellevue Hospital, which primarily treats detainees with severe physical health issues but also treats those with mental health conditions. The unit has around 100 beds.

The mayor also committed the city to completing two other outposted therapeutic units, which similarly would have beds available for those with severe mental health issues.

“The Mamdani administration will close Rikers Island once and for all and transition to a borough-based jail system, using every tool available to make that promise a reality,” Sam Raskin, a mayoral spokesperson, told the Eagle on Monday. “That means expanding alternatives to incarceration, strengthening access to mental health treatment and supportive housing, working with the courts to reduce case delays, and helping people safely return to their communities.”

“We are committed to creating a safer, more humane correctional system for all New Yorkers,” he added.