The “Close Rikers” madness surrounding the city’s controversial and dysfunctional jail complex has been with us for almost a decade, with no endgame in sight.
Yes, Mayor Adams says the jail complex is still on track to close, but we’ve been hearing those promises for years.
The project’s estimated cost has doubled from the original figure $8.7 billion cost — with not a single one of the four replacement borough-based jails built.
The Brooklyn structure is the only one where construction is underway; City Hall says it’ll be done sometime in 2029.
Contracts for jails in The Bronx and Queens are still in the Comptroller’s Office; nothing will get built before 2031 at the soonest.
And no Manhattan jail will be ready for at least another decade: The contract-bidding process is restarting after the previous winner dropped out.
And, again, the cost to erect all four has nearly doubled, to $15.6 billion . . . and counting.
Plus, the plan provides for only 4,160 beds at all four jails combined; Rikers now holds some 6,000 detainees.
We’d love for crime to drop so drastically that the city doesn’t need as much jail space, but it’s just demented to assume it will.
As it has from the start, it makes far more sense to erect new facilities on the same island that holds the old ones: The city can provide better intake and more humane conditions at a fraction of the cost.
Even while addressing the issue of transport to and from Rikers.
Before leaving office, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had proposed a state-of-the-art jail to replace the old Rikers Island complex, but Mayor Bill de Blasio trashed that plan, then washed his hands of the question.
When impractical “reformers” pushed out the “four replacements” plan, he then shrugged and (nominally) signed on.
In truth, the buildings aren’t why Rikers became a dangerous place where inmates have died from fentanyl overdoses and suicide, guards are beaten and maimed, and gangs control entire wards.
Anti-Rikers posers like then-City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito merely asserted that to justify downsizing jail capacity as they moved to destroy proactive “Broken Windows” policing, defund criminal justice and coddle sociopaths — tapping former state Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman to lead two commissions to give the “plan” a veneer of establishment legitimacy.
Old jails or new, the real problems center on management and labor: a Correction Department set in its dysfunctional ways and union contracts that further block real change.
The only “answer” to date was the city’s reluctant agreement to a federal consent decree that installed court-assigned monitor Steve Martin and his high-priced team in 2015 — at a taxpayer cost of more than $10 million over the years since.
And those costs keep rising as the feds push to put Correction into receivership, which would allow both a total reopening of the labor deals and a management makeover.
Meanwhile, the politicians keep pretending the Lippmann plan will fix everything while all the insiders keep reaping taxpayer green.
Mayor Adams, it’s time to call out this lunatic con.
Let the feds step in to address the root causes; push for rehab and/or new construction at the Rikers campus.
It’s a path that can actually reform the city’s jails, and it’s sure to be cheaper.
