Letter to the Editor: Closing Rikers will take courage

Candidates for District 24 discussed their perspectives on the plan to close Rikers Island and build a new jail in Kew Gardens. AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File

By Angel Tueros

This week David Brand forced City Council candidates in District 24 to answer clear, pointed questions about closing Rikers, and how to get it done.

The candidates voiced a range of opposition to the rebuilding of the Queens borough jail. Some raised the morally-repugnant and utterly-defeated idea that the toxic Rikers penal colony should be kept open and renovated; others complained about costs, which are irrelevant to rectifying human rights abuses; one raised the idea that “people are scared” (nevermind that fear is based on racist propaganda, not fact); and another professed-progressive incorrectly referred to Rikers as “one jail” (the island holds ten jails) and suggested that incarcerated people could be sent to “facilities upstate.”

Rikers Island is a human rights crisis that the next Council will inherit, but they will also inherit a plan to close it that was hard-won by people who survived Rikers. It is their obligation to listen to us and learn from us. I’ve been incarcerated in the jails on Rikers, and in the Queens jail before it was closed. All of them are decrepit dungeons unfit for human beings. As a member of Freedom Agenda and leader in the movement to close Rikers, I have fought to reduce incarceration in every way possible. But while anyone is still detained while awaiting trial in Queens, they deserve to be close to the courthouse and to their families and communities, and to be afforded conditions that recognize their humanity. Ignoring that truth is to choose the path of convenient cruelty that has left Rikers open so long. The candidates running in District 24, and throughout Queens, must do better.
Angel Tueros is an advocate, a writer, a public health advisor, a member of Freedom Agenda, and a resident of Queens.