NEW YORK CITY—The city’s decision to close the prisons on Rikers Island and transfer inmates to four smaller detention centers in the outer boroughs has sparked vigorous support and opposition.
Criminal justice reform advocates are hailing the move as long overdue, while others are expressing concern about the impact on the neighborhoods that will host the prisoners.
The population has fluctuated over the years and is significantly smaller from the more than 20,000 recorded in the early 1990s.
In 2015, the population dipped slightly under 10,000 for the first time in many years, but concerns about overcrowding have persisted.
Frequent fights, stabbings, and the deaths of inmates at Rikers have also fueled the push for getting rid of the city’s largest jail and moving the inmates elsewhere on humanitarian grounds.
The new carceral sites—located in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx—will each hold no more than 3,300 inmates.
Proponents say the idea is to provide a more humane alternative to Rikers Island, which has long had a reputation for overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe conditions.
In a statement last week, two prominent members of the council, Speaker Adrienne Adams and Criminal Justice Chair Sandy Nurse, urged Adams to move ahead with the closure of Rikers Island.
“Closing Rikers is essential to ending the humanitarian crisis and brutal violence that has impacted detainees and staff, and it’s the law,” the councilmembers said.
They called on Mayor Adams to not only close the prison but to make investments in pretrial programming, mental health services, reentry programs, and other penological approaches and strategies aimed at curbing recidivism.
The stance of the city council enjoys broad support from prisoners’ rights and criminal justice reform advocates.
‘Last Penal Colony’
The treatment of people with mental health problems poses special needs and requirements, and mingling them without rhyme or reason with a general population containing large numbers of violent criminals has been a huge mistake, said Megan French-Marcelin, director for New York State policy at the Legal Action Center, a Manhattan-based nonprofit.“The vast majority of people at Rikers Island need some level of treatment,” French-Marcelin told The Epoch Times.
“Indeed, 53 percent of people there now have some mental health diagnosis, and a full 10 percent have what’s defined as a serious mental illness, whether it’s schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or schizoaffective disorder.”
Besides the distinct needs of those requiring professional mental help, large numbers of the inmate population at Rikers Island—as high as 40 percent—struggle with drug or alcohol use disorder, she said.
Incarcerating such people at Rikers Island among murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals is in no one’s interest, French-Marcelin said.
Neither mental health professionals nor lawyers have easy access to inmates there, and prison conditions tend to quickly worsen new arrivals’ problems, she said.
“You can spend two hours at Rikers and feel like it affects your mental health, because it’s so dilapidated, the conditions are so terrible, it’s incredibly overcrowded, and it’s understaffed,” said French-Marcelin.
Holding suspects there who have not yet been charged with a crime, a common practice at Rikers Island, is unconscionable, she said.
Such people are there either on remand, on the orders of a judge, or because they are unable to put forward cash bail even as low as $500, she said.
This results in a two-tiered system of justice, where those who can come up with bail get out and those who cannot risk losing wages, jobs, homes, even their children, French-Marcelin said.
By contrast, the borough-based system that the 2027 plan envisages will place inmates in much smaller facilities in decent neighborhoods, where they will benefit from greater ease of access for family members, professionals seeking to treat them, and lawyers to discuss their cases.
“All of the facilities will have outdoor space so that people can see the daylight,” she said.
Safety Concerns
Not everyone is sold on the net social advantages of transferring inmates from Rikers Island to units in the boroughs.Harvey Kushner, chairman of the criminal justice department at Long Island University in Brookville, New York, said that he worked at Rikers under the auspices of educational programs in the 1980s and 1990s.
During that era, Kushner recalled, overcrowding was so bad that corrections officials adopted the expedient of moving prisoners to barges on the East River.
Some of the issues facing the prison system today are similar.
Kushner believes moving the inmates will harm the neighborhoods where the prisoners end up.
The plan amounts to a stage in the ongoing dismantling of New York’s criminal justice system, he told The Epoch Times.
“I understand that conditions on Rikers Island are not good. I was there when we had way over 24,000 people caught up in the system, and when AIDS was first discovered among prisoners,” he said.
“But transferring them is doing a disservice to people in the boroughs’ neighborhoods.”
Besides the danger that inmates may escape from the borough-based units into the surrounding streets, Kushner believes that residents have a right to be concerned about the type of people who will come to the neighborhoods to visit prisoners.
While some may be lawyers or family members, other visitors are likely to be people with the same criminal affiliations as prisoners, he said.
“I’m not talking about the correctional officers or the clergy, or those who provide educational services. I’m talking about the gangbangers who are visiting other gangbangers,” Kushner said.
“It’s totally disrespectful to the citizenry who surround these detention centers, whether in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, or the Bronx.”
The Department of Corrections did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
