Summer is winding down and so is the countdown for the city’s legal mandate to close Rikers Island. Monday marks exactly one year from the August 31, 2027, deadline to shutter the controversial jails and repurpose the land toward future environmental use — a deadline the city will almost certainly miss.
In 2017, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio publicly committed to closing Rikers Island. Safety concerns and building conditions long plagued and characterized the jail complex in the East River, leading to federal oversight after the class-action Nunez settlement over alleged excessive use of force. Importantly, most people on Rikers are held on pre-trial detention and innocent until proven guilty. They are also overwhelmingly Black and Latino.
Throughout the late 2010s, a roadmap developed. Plans for four smaller replacement jails, centered around more humane conditions and faster transport to court appearances, solidified: One for each borough, except Staten Island. They were fittingly dubbed the “borough-based jails.”
A City Council vote codified this commitment by October 2019 and greenlit the project, which totaled more than $8 billion. City officials set a legal deadline to shut down Rikers and build the new facilities by 2026 — but then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The city officially delayed the closure until 2027.
Today, however, the borough-based jails remain years away from completion. In 2023, a public contract quietly divulged that the Brooklyn facility would not open until two years after the deadline. The other borough-based jails are even more behind schedule: Substantial completion for the Bronx and Queens facilities is slated for 2031, according to the city. Manhattan’s is scheduled for 2032.
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Mayor Zohran Mamdani reiterated his support for closing Rikers throughout his successful campaign last year, but so did his predecessor (de Blasio’s successor), Eric Adams, who criminal justice advocates usually blame for the delays after he neglected laws to permanently decommission empty jails and reduce the incarcerated population. They also point to at least 48 people dying in or immediately after city detention under the previous administration. So far, Mamdani’s catch-up efforts and all-hands-on-deck approach have won over many of Adams’s biggest critics.
“Over the course of the campaign, I spoke about our commitment to closing Rikers Island and I also spoke candidly with New Yorkers about the fact that the prior administration’s lack of interest, to put it charitably, toward fulfilling that meant that the stated deadline was practically impossible to fulfill, because we’ve seen years of a flouting of not just recommendations but requirements, frankly,” Mamdani said in April. “It is going to take us quite a bit of time to ensure that we can put our city back on the path that the City Council voted for in 2019, and it will also take a whole-of-government approach.”
His appointments include the inaugural Close Rikers czar Dana Kaplan, who played a key role in crafting the borough-based jail plan, as well as Department of Correction (DOC) commissioner Stanley Martin, a criminal justice reformer who was once incarcerated on Rikers Island himself. Mamdani also mentioned collaborating with local prosecutors and Nicholas Demel, a federally appointed “remediation manager” who was granted sweeping authorities over city jails like those on Rikers to improve safety after previous administrations failed to properly implement court-ordered reforms stemming from the Nunez settlement.
Earlier this summer, the Mamdani administration also transferred land from offline jails from the DOC to the Department of Citywide Administrative Services. A local law mandates these transfers, which the Adams administration never performed. Rikers closure proponents like Freedom Agenda co-director Darren Mack see these efforts as key steps to ensure the city meets its mandate, even with delays in borough-based jail construction.
“Closing all of Rikers Island is going to be a challenge by August 31, 2027,” said Mack. “You might not close all of Rikers Island by that time, but what we can do is meet our decarceration goals of about 75% reduction and closing more jails on Rikers Island.”
Decarceration remains key because the four borough-based jails will hold just north of 4,000 beds. Rikers Island currently houses more than 6,500 people, according to the Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College. Mack believes the COVID-19 pandemic might provide a primer for those efforts, since community investments and an early release program dropped the city jail population to historic lows during the worldwide public health crisis.
The Mamdani administration pointed to recently expanding Next Mile NYC, a commercial driving license program for formerly incarcerated New Yorkers, which draws on a link between employment and lowered recidivism. A new hospital unit also drew praise from criminal justice reformers for moving seriously ill people on Rikers to specialized, offsite care.
While Mack commended Mamdani over the phone, he and other advocates remain frustrated with the new administration’s continued low-level enforcement, which largely affects Black and Brown New Yorkers. Two weeks ago, Freedom Agenda helped organize a highly public courtwatch in protest of these aggressive policing practices. Advocates fear low-level arrests might exacerbate Rikers’ population, even with Mamdani’s progress elsewhere.
Deaths in DOC custody also persist, albeit significantly fewer than during Adams’s first year. Most recently, 41-year-old Clarence Woodward died on Rikers Island this past week. With the one-year mark to legally close Rikers this week, Mack and Freedom Agenda will hold a vigil on August 3 for the more than 80 people to die in or immediately after DOC custody since the city originally committed to closing Rikers.
“We want to put this on the radar for this administration that we have to take urgency in regard to reducing the population [and] to close the pipelines that feed Rikers Island,” said Mack. “The biggest thing is just reminding New Yorkers, [because] only when it’s a death on Rikers Island is when New Yorkers are paying attention because the media reports on it. [The] Campaign to Close Rikers [has more than] 200 organizational partners driving this campaign. Come out and join this struggle to move our city forward [and] away from this moral stain on our city.”
