New NYC Jails Will Be Smaller Than First Planned, City Says

NEW YORK — The four high-rise jails meant to replace Rikers Island will be slightly shorter than originally expected, city officials said Friday.

The city decided to take 30 to 45 feet off of the new lockups in each borough but Staten Island after locals objected to their enormous sizes, officials said. But the changes will make the buildings no more than 13 percent shorter.

"We certainly have heard the feedback and concerns that neighborhoods would like the facilities to be in scale, and we want to be responsive to that," Dana Kaplan, deputy director at the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice, said at a City Hall news conference.

The planned size of Lower Manhattan's new jail at 125 White St. has shrunk by 45 feet but will still be the tallest of the four facilities at 450 feet, according to a city presentation. The city said in November that it would expand the existing Manhattan Detention Complex there instead of building a brand-new jail at 80 Centre St.

Queens's jail near the borough's criminal court in Kew Gardens will now be 270 feet, 40 feet shorter than first planned, the city says, while Downtown Brooklyn's lockup will be 395 feet instead of 430. The Bronx will have the shortest jail at 245 feet, a 30-foot reduction from the original plan.

The city was able to shrink the buildings by reducing the amount of "swing space" in the planned jail system, Kaplan said. The plans now call for about 5,750 beds across the four facilities to house no more than 5,000 people at a time instead of the original 6,000 beds.

The changes follow concerns from locals in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens about the massive size of the new buildings and their potential impacts on the surrounding areas.

The city may reduce the heights even further as the plans move forward, Kaplan said. The plans will be submitted Monday for certification by the City Planning Commission as part of the formal land-use review process, said Elizabeth Glazer, the director of the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice.

"We’ll work hard to continue to address those neighborhood concerns, including continuing to make decisions that could potentially further impact the height of the facilities," Kaplan said.

The changes were included in the draft environmental impact statement for the projects that the city released Friday morning, just one of many steps toward replacing the notorious Rikers Island complex with four borough-based jails by 2027. Officials say the smaller facilities will be safer and provide detainees better access to courts and social services.

In another significant change, the city now plans to house all women in Queens rather than spreading them among all four facilities. That will make it easier to provide "female-only" space for visiting and programming, according to Kaplan.

"It seemed as if the value of having the women together in order to provide the kinds of services and provide the kind of visitation, when combined with the fact that we think that the transportation issues will be alleviated, outweighed having them in each individual borough," Glazer said, noting that the city made the decision after consulting incarcerated women and others.

The city has also scrapped plans to open an arraignment court at the Bronx jail, which will be built on the current home of an NYPD tow pound. The site will also host about 270 units of housing, Glazer said. A previous plan for the neighborhood proposed by a non-profit had called for a mixed-use apartment building there.

Mayor Bill de Blasio first announced plans to close Rikers in 2017 after persistent advocacy from criminal-justice reformers. The City Council still has to approve plans for the new jails, and construction isn't expected to start until 2021.

But Jonathan Lippman, the state's former chief judge who led the commission that recommended closing Rikers, called it "remarkable that we have even gotten to this point."

"The City’s revised plans reflect an effort to further reduce jail capacity, a good first step," Lippman said in a statement. "It is our hope that in the coming months, further adjustments can be made to reduce the size and scope of the jail facilities so that they better integrate with their respective communities."