When confronted with public uproar over New York City’s teeming, deteriorating, and violence-breeding island jails, local government vowed to do better. They promised a new penal institution: This time, however it would be cleaner and safer, an atonement for the sins of the city’s dark carceral past.
Instead, they created the Rikers Island jails.
Since it opened in 1932, Rikers has become notorious for dysfunction and violence, the complaints a near-duplicate of those about its predecessor, a network of detention facilities on Roosevelt Island. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has made a similar proposal as his 20th century forebears, vowing to close the Rikers facilities: Jails on the island will be torn down, and new, more humane jails will rise in their place.
Last week the City Planning Commission approved the project, kick-starting the public land-use review process. The plan will next have to pass a committee vote and a full council vote by the New York City Council.
De Blasio praised the Planning Commission approval as, “a big step forward in the process of closing Rikers Island and creating a modern community-based jail system that is smaller, safer and fairer.”
“De Blasio’s plan is almost verbatim to the same argument that’s been used to build awful jails in the city going back to the 18th century,”
The new plan seems unassailable at first glance: Supplant Rikers with modern detention facilities, one in each of New York’s five boroughs except Staten Island. Rehabilitation and contemporary social science practices will be at the forefront of the design, says the de Blasio administration, which will create what penal architects call a “normative environment” by increasing natural light and reducing noise.
The proposal also calls for opening the ground floor to a community use, like an art gallery or a health clinic, in an attempt to integrate the jails into the neighborhood. If that doesn’t seem radical enough, a 2017 report by the Van Alen Institute and the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform calls one model of these prospective buildings “Justice Hubs” rather than “jails.”
Despite the seeming purity of its goals, the plan has met controversy, opposition, and logistical hurdles.
Implementing it would take 10 years and require driving down the city’s inmate population to at most 5,000—in recent years, this figure has approached 10,000. The cost? Nearly $9 billion. Every borough’s community board has rejected the plan, as have Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. and Queens Borough President Melinda Katz.