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Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has admitted something that’s been obvious for years: there is no chance that New York City can close the Rikers Island jail one year from today, the timeline imposed by the city council in 2019. Dana Kaplan, the city’s “Rikers czar,” acknowledged in late June that “we are not on track to meet” that cutoff.
But while Mamdani’s officials and city councilors have both conceded that “2027 is just not going to happen,” the closure law remains on the books. Presumably, we’ll see legislative action to extend the deadline, but no one has said when, or what new date will be suggested. Certainly, it will have to be after the completion of the replacement jails to be erected in four of the five boroughs. These are presently expected to remain under construction until at least 2032.
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The city’s comprehensive failure to meet its own schedule offers an opportunity for a reevaluation. Even if it can build the new jails on a revised timeline, New York still will not have enough jail beds to house dangerous offenders and flight risks pretrial. For years, questions about the practicality of shuttering Rikers have been dismissed as racist and retrograde. But now’s a good time to ask: What’s the plan, Mr. Mayor?
It’s worth recalling how New York got here. For a period of time in the 2010s, closing Rikers was the fixation of New York City and State’s progressive elite. The death of Kalief Browder, who committed suicide several years after his three-year ordeal on Rikers Island, became dispositive proof that the jail was beyond saving. An independent city commission chartered in 2016 to examine the question reached the preordained conclusion that “Rikers Island must be closed.”
Then-mayor Bill de Blasio, an eager criminal-justice “reformer,” embraced the cause. De Blasio and his administration pushed to replace Rikers with five jails in the boroughs themselves, with capacity to hold 5,000 offenders. That eventually became four jails — one each in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx—holding 3,300 detainees. As I’ve documented, that switch appears to have been driven more by political expediency than any realistic assessment of how many people New York City needed to detain.
The de Blasio-era closure plan — replacing Rikers with the four borough jails by August 31, 2027 — rested on two assumptions: that the borough jails could be built within eight years, and that the city’s average daily jail population could be reduced to 3,300. Neither assumption has proved realistic.
The jails themselves are both late and over budget. The Brooklyn facility is projected to be completed in 2029; the Bronx and Queens facilities in 2031; and the Manhattan site in 2032. City Hall says that the total cost of the four facilities is likely to be $13.7 billion — nearly 60% more than what the city estimated in 2019. Eric Adams’s administration, which was far less sympathetic to closure than is Mamdani’s, put the price tag at $16 billion. The construction effort faces staunch opposition from community groups that say that they don’t want “jailscrapers” in their backyards.
If and when the borough jails are built, they will not be adequate to detain the city’s pretrial detention population. As of this writing, over 6,500 individuals are currently detained in the Rikers complex. That includes over 3,600 charged with murder, a sex offense, or another violent felony. If Rikers did close in a year, where would all these people go?
The Rikers closure commission proposed a series of reforms that, it promised, would bring the daily population below the magic line. But since it issued that proposal in 2021, Rikers’s average daily population instead steadily climbed. That’s even with the implementation of policies, like parole reform, that were expected to reduce it. John Jay College’s Data Collaborative for Justice — a pro-closure group — projects that the daily population will be unchanged in a year absent “policy reforms.” It’s not clear what reforms, though, will cut Rikers’s population in half.
Advocates of closure have sometimes blamed Covid-19 for the delays in construction and the surge in daily population. There might have been merit to these arguments in the dark days of 2020 or 2021. But it’s implausible to blame the long-gone pandemic today.
Rather, the sources of the city’s problems are more pedestrian. In public-sector works, delay and budget overruns are the rule, not the exception. And it was never reasonable to expect that an average daily jail population of 3,300 — a lower figure, the New York Times noted in 2019, than the city had seen in nearly a century — was attainable. This was so especially because the city and state had already dramatically curtailed pretrial detention, and because crime was almost certain to rise at some point from its historic lows in 2019.
All of this was predictable. Indeed, many saner voices predicted it. But Rikers’s closure was first and foremost a moral crusade aimed at achieving racial and social justice. The practicalities of providing jails that are safe for both their residents and the public were always an inconvenience to be wished away.
Mayor Mamdani — a committed decarceralist who once endorsed outright prison abolition — still wants Rikers to close. That’s his prerogative. And there’s certainly no reason that pretrial detainees need to be held on Rikers — it is conceptually possible, even if not necessarily plausible, to build replacements in the boroughs. (I outlined a way to do so several years ago.)
But the plan, such as it was, measurably did not accomplish that goal. The city’s first attempt to shutter Rikers is late, over budget, and inadequate to the needs of a functional jail system. Mamdani seems committed to trying again. So the question must be asked, again and again, for the next year: Mr. Mayor, what’s the plan?
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This is republished with permission from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. The original can be found here.
Charles Fain Lehman is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal.
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