City misses deadline to release Rikers shutdown plan
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City Hall missed a deadline required under a new City Council law to issue a report detailing its plan to shut Rikers Island and replace it with four borough-based jails. AP file photo by Seth Wenig
By Jacob Kaye
The city blew past a legal deadline Friday to release a detailed plan for closing Rikers Island, leaving its long-delayed effort to shutter the dangerous jail complex without a clear path forward.
Despite a law requiring officials to produce and publicly release two reports outlining the closure by May 1, neither document had been completed by the deadline, the Eagle has learned.
The missed deadline is the latest delay in an effort to shut the jail complex where over 100 people have died in the past decade.
The reporting requirement stems from legislation passed by the City Council in October 2025, during the final months of Mayor Eric Adams’ administration, which largely slow-walked the plan to close Rikers and replace it with four borough-based jails by 2027.
That same law, dubbed Local Law 140, also mandated that City Hall appoint a coordinator to oversee the closure effort and the development of the nearly $16 billion borough-based jail system.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration began searching for a candidate in mid-March and tapped Dana Kaplan – a longtime criminal justice reformer who helped craft the original Rikers closure plan under former Mayor Bill de Blasio – to serve as the “close Rikers czar” in late April. Kaplan is not expected to begin serving in the role until later this month.
A spokesperson for the mayor said that Kaplan would immediately begin coordinating the city’s efforts to meet its legal obligations surrounding Rikers’ closure once she officially takes office.
"Local Law 140 was passed in October 2025, after which the previous administration did not take steps to stand up the coordinator role required under the law,” the spokesperson said. “The Mamdani administration made it a priority — posting the position within our first 100 days and, after a search, announced Tuesday that Dana Kaplan will serve as close Rikers czar.”
“The legislation includes several components, including reports and interagency coordination, and we are working closely with the City Council to fulfill them in a way that is thoughtful, robust, and collaborative — not just checking a box, but taking the time to get this right. We are committed to following through and finishing the job of closing Rikers Island as quickly and safely as possible,” they added.
One of the reports due Friday was supposed to be created by an interagency task force made up of around a dozen agencies and overseen by the close Rikers czar. It’s unclear whether the task force, which is required to include the heads of the Department of Correction, the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, the NYPD, the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, and others, has met.
The report was supposed to detail the task force’s plan for shutting Rikers Island and opening the borough-based jails, and include budget recommendations, a projected timeline for construction of the four new jails, and recommendations about how to turn the island off the coast of Queens into a renewable energy hub.
The law also ordered the creation of a report from the Department of Correction, detailing how the agency plans to make the jails safer and more secure, recruit staff, and change its culture, which has been described by the federal monitor tasked with tracking conditions in the jails as “toxic,” “dysfunctional,” and “problematic.”
The law, which was passed less than a month before last year’s mayoral election, was largely created in response to the way the Adams administration managed Rikers’ closure, according to Brooklyn City Councilmember Sandy Nurse, the legislation’s sponsor and the former chair of the Council’s Committee on Criminal Justice.
“We wanted to create structure and organization where there didn't seem to be any,” Nurse told the Eagle on Friday. “We wanted to make sure that whoever is the mayor, they can’t just kick Rikers’ closure down the road.”
A spokesperson for City Council Speaker Julie Menin said that “the City Council looks forward to receiving and reviewing the reports.”
“Closing Rikers is pivotal to improving safety for incarcerated individuals, staff, and communities,” they said. “We must remain focused on taking the necessary steps to ensure the borough-based jail plan becomes a reality, and the Council will work with the administration and stakeholders to do so.”
The plan to close Rikers, which was passed into law in 2019, fell years behind schedule under Adams. Some of the delays were out of his hands – construction slowdowns brought on by the pandemic pushed the timeline for the borough-based jails back several years and contributed to doubling their cost. But Adams also regularly questioned the plan created by his predecessor and suggested on numerous occasions that the city change course. Critics also complained that Adams’ City Hall lacked a point person dedicated to fulfilling the plan to close the jails.
Mamdani, who vowed to close Rikers while on the campaign trail, has made a number of moves since taking office in an effort to get the plan back on track, though it now appears to be an impossibility that the city meets the 2027 closure deadline.
In addition to hiring Kaplan, Mamdani recently opened a 104-bed unit at Bellevue Hospital where detainees with severe physical illnesses will be treated. The unit, and two others that Mamdani said would soon begin construction, are meant to help reduce the population on Rikers Island, which, at around 6,600 detainees, is currently over 1,000 people too large for the borough-based jail system, which has been designed to hold 4,400 detainees. The Mamdani administration also recently celebrated the completion of the structural frame of the Brooklyn borough-based jail, most of which was built under Adams. The Brooklyn jail will be the first of the borough facilities to open when it is completed in 2029.
Nurse said that she’s not as concerned about the reports not being filed by the May 1 deadline because she believes the new administration is “operating in good faith.”
“If you talk to me at the end of the year and we don't have something, then we'll have a problem,” she said. “But I don’t think that’s the case and I think we're in a good place.”
Advocates who have fought for Rikers’ closure for decades placed the blame for the missed deadlines on Adams, but urged Mamdani to move ahead with closing Rikers as quickly as possible.
“Closing Rikers is not just important in general, it's essential to the mayor's economic justice agenda,” said Darren Mack, the co-director of Freedom Agenda. “It's working people who are getting hauled off to Rikers when they can't pay bail or are suffering there because they can't afford the mental health treatment that wealthy New Yorkers enjoy.”
“Despite the delays that Eric Adams caused, Mayor Mamdani could still close most of the Rikers jails by the legal deadline if the city treats it with urgency,” he added. “With a Rikers czar in place now, we hope to see the city put the full force of government behind this.”
Zachary Katznelson, the executive director of the Independent Rikers Commission, said the city could fulfill its reporting requirements under Local Law 140 by turning to the work of the commission, which issued its second blueprint to close Rikers a little more than a year ago. Kaplan served as a senior advisor to the commission and Stanley Richards, the new Department of Correction commissioner, was a member.
“It's clear that the Mamdani administration understands the fierce urgency to close Rikers – for the safety of everyone inside its walls, and for the sake of all New Yorkers,” Katznelson told the Eagle in a statement. “To that end, the Independent Rikers Commission, with a vast array of expertise and experience, spent over a year developing a comprehensive blueprint to safely close Rikers. The administration should adopt that plan and drive it forward.”
“We look forward to working with them, the Council, and other vital partners to do so,” he added.
