Inmates Of First Rikers Jail To Close Won't Leave Island: City

RIKERS ISLAND, NY — Inmates at the first Rikers Island jail to close won't be going far. About 400 young men housed in the George Motchan Detention Center, the first slated to close under the city's 10-year plan to shutter the entire beleaguered facility, will be moved to one of two other buildings on the island, correction officials said this week.

All 18-year-olds at the Motchan jail will move to the Robert N. Davoren Center, which houses older adults and 16- and 17-year old inmates, Correction Commissioner Cynthia Brann said.

Inmates who are 19 to 21 years old will go to the Eric M. Taylor Center, a jail for adult and adolescent men serving sentences of one year or less. Unlike the current Taylor inmates, the men at Motchan are detained on criminal charges and haven't been sentenced for crimes.

The young men represent about two thirds of the roughly 600 inmates currently housed at the Motchan jail, which Brann said is less than half full. The city plans to close it by this summer as part of Mayor Bill de Blasio's plan to shut down the scandal-scarred Rikers Island complex.

There's not yet a timeline for moving the Motchan inmates or a plan for where those older than 21 will go, the DOC said.

The jail's closure is a chance for the DOC to make a "fresh start" and ensure people held at Rikers are prepared to go back to their lives when they get out, said Vidal Guzman, a community organizer with JustLeadership USA, which has led the push to shutter the island.

"We scratched a jail off the board now. Now it’s time to really invest in these people," said Guzman, who spent a year at Motchan when he was 19.

The Board of Correction, the oversight body for the city jail system, voted Tuesday to continue to let the DOC house young adult inmates alongside older adults so the plan to relocate them can go forward.

City jails housed 851 18- to 21-year-olds as of last month, Brann said. They make up about 9.8 percent of the total jail population, down from 11.5 percent in January 2016.

Some young men have long stays at Motchan, Guzman said. He met a 16-year-old in his time there who was still in the jail when Guzman came back to visit about five years later, he said.

The department plans to eventually house all 18- to 21-year-old men in the Robert N. Davoren Center before all of the island's nine jails close over the next decade, Brann said.

The Davoren jail "has the infrastructure, the program space and the culture of working with young population since 2014," Brann said at Tuesday's Board of Correction meeting. The DOC also plans to set aside parts of the Eric M. Taylor Center for young adults when they're moved, Brann said.

Brann touted the DOC's increased investment in job-training programs at Motchan, which she said will continue at the other jails. Staffers who teach carpentry, culinary arts, computer skills and other classes will at Motchan will make the move with the inmates, the DOC says.

But correction board member James Perrino — a veteran correction officer who once oversaw operations at the Davoren and Taylor jails — questioned whether the other jails would have enough space for those programs. He said the DOC should develop a detailed plan to make sure there's room for the classes to continue.

"I don’t believe that the programming space that’s there right now is adequate for the amount of progress that the department has done in the last few years," Perrino said.

More space at Davoren will open up once the 16- and 17-year-olds housed there leave the island in October, as required by a new state law raising the age of criminal responsibility, Brann said. Correction department staff are working to "make sure everything is where it should be" when the young adults get there, she said.

(Lead image: Snow covers the Rikers Island jail complex on Jan. 5. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)