Eric Adams supports new finding that Rikers jail won't close by legal deadline

Politico

19-03-2025

NEW YORK — A commission that supports closing the jail on Rikers Island acknowledged Wednesday the decrepit facility will not be shuttered by the 2027 deadline — and Mayor Eric Adams expressed vindication with the news.
The Independent Rikers Commission nevertheless outlined how the city could fully transition to four under-construction jails, despite the detainee population exceeding capacity at the planned facilities.
The 114-page report, produced at the behest of City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, urged City Hall to speed up construction of the four jail projects across the city. The commission also called for transferring mentally ill inmates to psychiatric facilities and expanding alternative-to-incarceration programs.
'For decades, Rikers has been marked by dysfunction, violence and neglect — failing not only incarcerated people, but the staff and the entire city. Our blueprint lays out a clear path for Rikers to be closed safely, as is required by law,' said commission chair and former New York Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman. 'With strong leadership by New York's current and future officeholders, and the urgency that has been sorely missing, we can end the stain of Rikers forever.'
Closing the notorious jail complex became a rallying cry among left-flank Democrats after documented incidents of mistreatment, most notably the case of Kalief Browder. The Bronx teenager was detained on Rikers for three years — much of it in solitary confinement — and killed himself after his charges were dropped and he was released.
Under the leadership of then-Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, the body voted to shutter the facility in 2019 — a move she and former Mayor Bill de Blasio celebrated at the time, even though the mayor was initially a skeptic.
Things have not gone according to plan ever since.
Eric Adams — a former NYPD captain with a conservative bent — has long been cool to closing the detention complex and overruled a bill Adrienne Adams' championed to limit the practice of solitary confinement.
His administration estimates the replacement jails in Queens and Manhattan could take until 2032 to complete — five years after Rikers' legally mandated closing date. Costs to build the four new jails have ballooned from $8.7 billion to $15.5 billion, and the jail population is 6,800, which is 2,300 more than the total capacity of the planned facilities.
Those headwinds have further pitted Eric Adams, who has called the original plan unworkable, against Adrienne Adams. The speaker, who is running to unseat him in June, has the power to amend the 2019 law but has lambasted the administration for delays in increasing off-site mental health bed capacity and instituting alternatives to incarceration that could reduce the population.
'We are glad that the Lippman Commission is finally recognizing what we have been sounding the alarm on for years — the plan for Rikers was flawed and did not offer a realistic timeline,' the mayor said in a statement.
He called on the council to amend the 2019 law and allow the city to unlock emergency capital funds.
'To leave the plan as is and deny us these funds hurts our staff and is inhumane to those in our custody,' he added.
The speaker, however, said the council would not pursue any modifications until it had secured new commitments from City Hall.
'Our city's mayoral administration must be willing to take concrete action steps and dedicate resources required to implement this blueprint, so another viable plan does not go unfulfilled,' she said. 'There is no shortcut to the work ahead, and there can be no discussions about the legal closure date without these types of commitments from the Administration.'
The main problem with the current plan, according to the report, is the mismatch between the detainee population and the capacity of the four planned jails, which are currently under construction in every borough except Staten Island. And a major contributor to that is the court system.
About 84 percent of the people detained at Rikers are awaiting trial, according to the report. And the average wait for a day in court is almost nine months.
The New York State Office of Court Administration is pursuing changes to how it handles certain types of cases, according to the commission, which predicted those reforms would reduce the Rikers population by up to 1,600 people or more within three to five years.
By using more alternatives like pretrial electronic monitoring and supervised release, the report argued the daily Rikers population could be reduced by another 750 people. Together, those changes are expected to bring the headcount down to 4,500.
The original Rikers plan called for creating nearly 400 secure hospital beds for detainees with severe mental illness. The commission is demanding the city to make good on its commitment — after a severely delayed rollout — and create another 500 beds to create more capacity in the system.
The report also calls for the city to speed up construction on the replacement jails by a year by allowing vendors to do some construction tasks simultaneously rather than in series and by bringing in experts to eyeball the projects. It's a tall order in the world of New York infrastructure projects, which routinely come in late and over budget.
While the commission said external factors like crime rates and Covid have contributed to the difficulty with the 2027 deadline, the report also blamed elected officials for a lack of urgency and action.
To that end, it suggested placing one senior official each at City Hall and the Department of Correction to get the closure goal accomplished.
The new jails would allow families of detainees to more easily visit since Rikers is geographically isolated. And purveyors of the plan argued it would ultimately save the city money by razing Rikers and investing in more easily managed modern correction facilities.