Harlem Women's Jail Proposal Knocked By Activists, Scholars

HARLEM, NY — The proposal to open a new women's jail in a shuttered Harlem lockup is facing new criticism from a coalition of activists, scholars and formerly incarcerated people, who said the plan would only perpetuate a cruel pattern of incarceration.

The proposed "Women's Center for Justice" would be housed within the former Lincoln Correctional Facility, an eight-story jail building on 110th Street between Fifth and Lenox avenues that has sat empty since 2019.

As Patch reported in June, a plan to replace the city's existing women's jail on Rikers Island with a new facility in Harlem has been drawn up by the Columbia University Justice Lab, scholars from the University of Texas, and the real estate consulting firm HR&A Advisors.

Now, however, more than 600 people have signed on to an open letter opposing the Harlem plan, saying that no new jail could solve the problems that plague Rikers Island's Rose M. Singer Center, where women and gender non-conforming people are now held.

"We know this plan, like other efforts to repackage incarceration as humane and progressive, does not chart us away from the prison industrial complex," reads the letter, released last Tuesday.

Signatories include the activist and scholar Angela Davis, organizer Mariame Kaba and the professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Neighborhood names include Jess Hallam and Katie Doman, staff attorneys at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem.

A better alternative

Supporters of the Harlem jail say it would be a better alternative than the city's current plan. Once the Rikers Island complex closes by 2027, the city intends to move all female and gender-expansive prisoners to a new jail in Kew Gardens, Queens — part of a larger facility that will also house a men's jail.

The Kew Gardens jail would force women and gender-expansive people to share an entrance hall, medical spaces, and some programming areas with male prisoners — an unacceptable result, since many people in custody have been abused or assaulted by men, advocates say.

The Harlem jail would have the advantage of putting incarcerated people closer to their families, since Harlem is already among the ZIP code with the highest number of admissions to the Rosie Singer Center, proponents of the plan say.

A proposal for the Harlem jail that advocates gave before a City Council committee in June said the 110th Street facility could be "a gender-responsive, trauma-informed and therapeutic site," run by nonprofits using a model that puts people "on paths to healthy, safe and stable lives."

But Dr. Snehal Patel, an assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the plan's opponents, countered in a statement that 'Trauma-informed' and "jail" are inherently contradictory."

"It is misleading and dangerous to attempt to sell it to the public using language co-opted from public health and mental health professionals," Patel said in a statement released along with the open letter against the Harlem jail.

The existing Kew Gardens plan is part of the city's borough-based jails plan, which calls for replacing Rikers with four new jails around the city. The Manhattan facility would be based on White Street, close to the existing Manhattan Detention Complex and steps from Chinatown.

The site of the proposed Harlem jail is represented in the City Council by Kristin Richardson Jordan, a self-described prison abolitionist. Reached for comment, a spokesperson said that Richardson Jordan "has long been a proponent of closing Rikers without opening new borough-based jails."

Richardson Jordan will host a town hall discussing the future of Lincoln Correctional Facility on Aug. 8, from 6-7 p.m. at her district office at 181 West 135th St.

Known as Rosie's, the Rose M. Singer Center on Rikers Island now houses women, transgender, gender non-conforming and nonbinary people. In May, 31-year-old Mary Yehudah died at the jail, due to what her family says was a failure to treat her for diabetes — the latest instance in what many have called a humanitarian crisis at Rikers.

Related coverage: Shuttered Harlem Jail Should House New Women's Lockup, Experts Say