No Hard Timeline Yet For Closing Rikers Island Jails

NEW YORK — New York City officials do not yet have a detailed timeline for closing Rikers Island's jails as they push through plans for the four controversial new lockups that will replace them.

Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration is still developing a schedule for shutting down the 11 deteriorating jails on and off the island that the brand-new lockups will eventually replace, officials said at a City Council hearing.

The only certainty as the city's jail population shrinks is that the old facilities will be shuttered and the new ones opened by the end of 2026, the officials said.

"In connection with our current population reduction, the Department of Correction is committed to both decommissioning entire facilities or portions of facilities in recognition of the reduced population," Brenda Cooke, the Correction Department's chief of staff, told lawmakers. "And so we plan to be responsive to our population reduction and downsize the size of the footprint of either the existing facilities in whole or in part between now and 2026."

Those vague assurances came as the council's Subcommittee on Landmarks, Public Siting and Maritime Uses took up the de Blasio administration's proposal for four high-rise jails in Downtown Brooklyn, Lower Manhattan, Kew Gardens and Mott Haven.

The council hearing marked the start of the final step of the formal land-use review process through which city officials have been ushering the plans since March. The City Planning Commission on Tuesday approved the modified proposal for the new lockups, which are a linchpin of de Blasio's plan to close the Rikers complex notorious for violence and inhumane conditions.

While council Speaker Corey Johnson has expressed support for the $8.7 billion plan, lawmakers can negotiate further changes to it before taking a final vote by the end of next month.

The George Motchan Detention Center became the first Rikers jail to close under the city's plan last year, a development that de Blasio heralded with a press release. The island is still home to eight operational jails.

While Cooke said the Department of Correction "decommissioned" more than 500 additional jail beds earlier this year, officials indicated there is not yet a clear schedule for shuttering the lockups that remain open on Rikers and in Manhattan, Brooklyn and The Bronx.

The DOC will determine that schedule based on factors such as the infrastructure at the existing jails, the types of inmates they house and staffing considerations, according to Cooke.

"In terms of the specific sequencing of bringing offline the existing borough facilities and then opening new borough facilities, that is a timeline that is still being developed," said Dana Kaplan, a deputy director at the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice.

Bronx Council Member Rafael Salamanca pressed city officials on their plans to close the Vernon C. Bain Center, a jail barge that has floated off the Hunts Point waterfront since 1992. The 100-cell barge has remained open in Salamanca's district for close to three decades even though it was meant to be a temporary facility.

"The horrors that happen on Rikers Island are also happening in the barge, and I find that a 10-year plan to shut down the barge is irresponsible and unacceptable," said Salamanca, a Bronx Democrat who chairs the council's Land Use Committee, which will likely play a significant role in the jail project.

Salamanca also raised concerns about the proposed location of the new Bronx jail at the current home of an NYPD tow pound in Mott Haven. The site is "is not the right one for the community," he said, noting that a nonprofit had proposed a large housing development there.

But the city found the location preferable to a smaller and more awkard spot near the borough's courthouse where the jail would have had to be much taller, according to Kaplan.

Ranging in height from 245 to 450 feet, the planned lockups would each hold 1,150 beds to house a total of about 4,000 people across the city, down from about 6,000 planned beds for an expected jail population of 5,000. City officials have attributed the decrease in part to statewide bail reforms that will take effect in January.

The de Blasio administration says the new jails will be safer, more humane and give detainees better access to their families, attorneys and social services. But community boards in all four boroughs have voted against the proposal, raising concerns about the size of the jails and the top-down review process. And a vocal coalition of activists called No New Jails NYC has argued that the city should not build any more facilities to lock people up.