$241 Million Later, Brand-New Bellevue Hospital Jail Unit Sits Empty

By Reuven Blau, The City

July 21, 2025, 5:00 a.m.

After years of planning, a new jail bed unit in Bellevue Hospital for seriously ill detainees from Rikers Island has been mostly ready to open since January — but sits empty because jail officials say they don’t have enough officers to operate it, and state inspectors say it is still not safe enough.

The 104-bed Department of Correction outpost unit is nearly double over budget and years late, with a budget that has ballooned from $130 million to $241 million, according to Correctional Health Services (CHS), an arm of NYC Health and Hospitals that provides medical care for detainees.

That breaks down to a little over $2 million per bed — and recreation area — located on almost all of the historic hospital’s second floor.

The unit — announced in 2019 and initially set to open in 2022 — was years late being completed in part because jail officials continually asked for changes to the plan to make it safer for city correction officers, construction records show.

Health-care workers walk across First Avenue outside Bellevue Hospital, July 3, 2024. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY

It was expected to be the first of three outpost units — one in Woodhull Hospital and another in North Central Bronx Hospital — announced shortly after the close Rikers plan was embraced by former Mayor Bill de Blasio. That plan calls for 4,400 beds in borough based facilities near courthouses.

In March, DOC Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie blamed the delay on the lack of approval from the New York State Commission of Correction (SCOC), which oversees all lockups in the state.

But that has obfuscated yet another issue: the city’s Department of Corrections says it would need to hire at least 200 officers to staff the specialized site, according to a jail official familiar with the situation.

That’s in part because of a spike in population on Rikers tied to a recent state prison strike and lack of mental health hospital bed space for detainees found unfit to stand trial.

As a result, DOC hasn’t formally submitted its proposed staffing plan to the state oversight commission for approval.

“The NYC Department of Correction is actively working with the SCOC to provide all necessary documentation required for final approvals,” said Correctional Health Services spokesperson Nicole Levy.

Aaron Cagwin, a SCOC spokesperson, said the new unit has “construction deficiencies that impact safety and security.”

The DOC also must finalize policies and procedures and properly train staff as required, he added.

“The facility cannot open until those items have been completed,” he said.

Under the plan, correction officials will oversee security of the unit while CHS will be in charge of who is sent to the specialized housing area and when they are discharged.

CHS says it will use an additional 103 full-time civil service employees to staff the unit. They include nurses, mental health experts, and backend employees to tackle paperwork.

Criminal justice advocates and some jail experts contend the site could be opened with far less than 200 correction officers — and that opening the unit would actually free up staff on Rikers.

“That’s their excuse,” Zachary Katznelson, executive director of the Independent Rikers Commission, which was formed by the City Council in 2016 with the intent of finding non-penal uses for the island. “The reality, of course, is that they’re wasting significant amounts of officer time moving people back and forth to Bellevue who need care. And the whole point is you won’t have to do any of that because they’ll actually be at Bellevue already.”

Missed Appointments

DOC officials have struggled for years to transfer detainees with major medical needs to and from Bellevue, jail records show.

Of the almost 2,200 scheduled appointments at an off-Rikers clinic, only 43% of the time was a scheduled person actually seen from January through March, according to the latest CHS report available. All told, DOC failed to properly transfer detainees with serious medical issues 782 times over those three months, the data shows.

As for the Bellevue outpost site, in March DOC Assistant Commissioner Alex Maldonado told the City Council that it still had not opened because there was “ongoing construction” at the location.

“The department has not received turnover of that facility,” she said.

At that hearing, City Council member Lincoln Restler (D-Brooklyn) noted that a Correctional Health Services official testified a day before that the location was ready to use.

Even then, DOC already obtained a temporary clearance from the city’s Buildings Department to begin moving people into the unit, he noted.

“They said the facility is absolutely ready,” Restler said. “They can be moved to Bellevue today. Why are you refusing to do so?”

In response, Maldonado said there were still additional issues but did not detail any outstanding problems. She also refused to give a timeline for when DOC expected to tackle those problems.

Bellevue isn’t the only Rikers outpost spot delayed and way over budget, city records show.

A project to create 144 DOC-dedicated beds at Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn has gone from $239 million to $381 million and counting, according to CHS. The unit — originally set to open in 2023 — is now set to be completed in 2028, Levy said.

Similarly, North Central Bronx Hospital’s proposed detention unit, with 92 beds, went from $240 million to $288 million, CHS records show. That site — originally set to be finished in 2024 — is also now expected to be done by 2028, according to Levy.

The Woodhull costs include “infrastructure upgrades” needed to support the new unit, said CHS spokesperson Levy.

“Cost increases reflect an increase in market conditions, design changes, and additional security enhancements required for the facility to ensure the safety of staff and patients,” she added.

The price tag for three hospital jail outpost sites has gone from $609 million to $910 million, city records show.

Some of the added costs are tied to an increase in construction prices since the pandemic in 2020, according to city officials.

“The design team submitted a full package of the required changes in 2023, which were subsequently approved and incorporated into the on-site construction work,” Levy said.

Those changes included everything from locker rooms for officers to an emergency generator, she added.

Jail and CHS officials have never explained why those details were not included in the original plan.

The number of correction officers needed to safely guard a jail — or hospital — unit has been in dispute for decades.

The Correction Officers Benevolent Association has long argued that the DOC is significantly understaffed, even as the number of correction officers is now about the same as the number of detainees. The union notes that the 1:1 staff ratio is unfair because jails must be staffed 24/7 and calls criticism of its staffing levels unfair because officers are not all on duty at the same time.

Correction officers tend to prefer assignments away from detainees, like transportation, perimeter security or the visitation unit, according to multiple jail insiders.

The DOC has never publicly disclosed how many officers are assigned to those support services. Some jail experts contend those jobs could be done by civilian staff.

In Bellevue, the DOC initially said it would take close to 300 officers and supervisors to make the 100-inmate Bellevue unit safe, according to Katznelson.

“The answer we got from DOC is because of civil service rules and union contracts,” he said. The department says it needs a captain for sanitation, recreation and housing, he added.

“When you only have one small unit, can’t one captain do both sanitation and recreation?” he asked. “They don’t appear to be trying to be reasonably economizing at all.”

“Opening the Bellevue units has to be a priority,” he said. “These are incredibly ill people who, right now, aren’t getting the care they need at anywhere near the rate that they need.”

This press release was produced by The City. The views expressed here are the author’s own.