WE WILL GET
RIKERS CLOSED,
SAYS ADAMS
3 years from deadline to shut Rikers Island, Mayor announces massive plan to close the pipelines that feed Rikers, comply with 2027 closure law.
August 30, 2024
NEW YORK CITY - Today, just shy of three years out from the August 31, 2027 deadline to shutter the jails on Rikers Island, Mayor Eric Adams announced an ambitious plan to invest in communities and shrink the New York City jail population, in alignment with a plan passed in 2019 and referred to by the City as “a historic decarceration plan to close Rikers Island and replace it with a smaller network of safer modern jails.”
“As I’ve said before, I want to close the pipelines that feed Rikers,” said the mayor, “and for too long those pipelines have been funneling people from the same neighborhoods into Rikers, only for them to come back to communities still reeling from decades of disinvestment and discrimination. We’re done with that revolving door. It’s time to invest in the things that work. I’m always going to put public safety first, and the truth is, Rikers has been undermining public safety.”
“It’s time to invest in the things that work.”
Pointing to evidence that alternatives to incarceration and detention are much more effective in preventing re-arrests than jail time, the mayor announced a $30 million increased annual investment in these programs. “New York City has the best network of alternative-to-incarceration and supervised release providers anywhere in this country, so we’re going to bring their capacity up to scale. But this isn’t just about funding - we’re going to be pulling together district attorneys, judges, public defenders and program providers to figure out how we can match people with the programs that best meet their needs and then get people into those programs quickly. No more waiting 10 months on Rikers to get placed in an ATI. If we have a service that is going to get to the root of the problems that led to someone getting arrested, why waste time with them sitting in a cell on Rikers? And that’s what we hear from victims too - people want to make sure what happened to them doesn’t happen to anyone else, and these programs have a better track record with that than Rikers.”
The announcement marks a shift from a mayor who has previously proposed cuts to ATI and reentry programs, and who has overseen a 19% increase in the jail population, the largest since the Giuliani administration.
Pictured: Advocates rally near City Hall in 2023, calling for action to close Rikers Island.
The mayor also drew connections between Rikers Island and the mental health and housing challenges New Yorkers face, saying “50 percent of people at Rikers Island are dealing with mental health issues and 20 percent have severe mental health issues. Rikers Island has been our treatment for the most part. We’re saying no to that now.” He went on to say, “Of course there is a lot that we want to see the state do as well, and the federal government, around mental health, but there is so much that we can do. We have resources. We’re spending over half a million dollars per year to keep people on Rikers Island, and we have to be honest, they are not getting the treatment they need there.”
Citing research from 2022, the mayor said, “We’ve got about 2,500 people on Rikers who could benefit from supportive housing. So we’re gonna get them that housing. We’re allocating $120 million annually for 2,500 new units of supportive housing. And we’re going to make sure these providers are really set up to offer the quality services that people need, and we’re going to help them identify properties. We’re going to overhaul our application and placement systems too, so that we aren’t screening out people who need the help. We’ve got all these people who’ve been cycling in and out of shelter and jail but on paper it looks like they aren’t what we call ‘chronically homeless’ because their time in shelter keeps getting interrupted by time in jail. It makes no sense.”
“It makes no sense.”
The administration also committed $10 million to eliminating the waitlist for programs designed to provide individualized, mobile mental health care. “We can’t have someone waiting 90 days to get placed with a treatment team, meanwhile they may go into crisis and end up arrested or even in jail,” Adams said. “To tell someone, we don’t have treatment available for you right now, but we do have a jail bed on Rikers - that’s not the city we want to be.”
Pictured: Members of the Campaign to Close Rikers hold ahead of a City Council hearing this spring that addressed the Department of Correction's budget.
The mayor went on to note the racial disparities that are reflected in the City’s use of incarceration. “This is not the deep South. When we have a situation where 60% of the people in our jails are Black but only 20% of New Yorkers are, we have to wonder about the inequities at every step of the process. It's been the same Black and Brown communities that have been feeding Rikers and the state prisons since I was a kid. So we need to end discriminatory policing, and we also need to go upstream, especially when it comes to our young people. I’m starting with setting aside $500 million annually to implement the initial recommendations of the Commission on Community Reinvestment and the Closure of Rikers, but that’s just the start. This fall and winter, we’ll be holding public meetings in seven New York communities with the highest incarceration rates so we can hear directly about the upstream investments that will keep our people out of the Rikers pipeline. Really it’s not rocket science – the safest communities are the ones with the most resources, not the most incarceration.”
“The safest communities are the ones with the most resources, not the most incarceration.”
Asked about the delayed timeline for completing the borough jails that are meant to house people moving off Rikers, the mayor sought to reassure critics. “We’re taking a look at those contracts and we’re figuring out every way we can expedite the process. Part of that will be reverting to the original capacity for each jail - with the commitments we’ve made today that will make our communities safer than incarceration ever has, I don’t see us needing more jail beds for women, or overall, than the original plan.” He went on to say “We’re proud to announce that we’ll be using emergency measures to open outposted therapeutic housing units at Bellevue Hospital ahead of schedule, by the end of this month, and the remaining units at Woodhull and North Central Bronx by the end of this year. When we have people dying in our jails due to lack of medical care, we have to act like it’s an emergency, because it is.”
In the coming weeks, the mayor pledged to roll out further steps of his Close Rikers Action Plan, including measures to address accountability and culture change in the Department of Correction, and to comply with Local Law 42 to end the use of solitary confinement.
Asked if he anticipated any challenges to implementing this agenda in just three years, the mayor smiled. “We’re New York City. We can do this.”