Shuttering New York’s Rikers Island complex will be no small task, but the city’s mayor unveiled plans Thursday to make good on his vow to close the notorious jail with a history of brutal violence.
The roadmap — published nearly three months after Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to shut down Rikers — includes a series of prosecutor-backed measures to reduce the incarceration rate of petty criminals.
For years, many New York officials and legal experts have been calling for the closure of Rikers Island, which shares its name with the island on the East River where it is located between the city’s Queens and Bronx boroughs.
The sprawling complex has imprisoned celebrities including Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, rapper Tupac Shakur, as well as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund.
The city’s jails take in some 9,400 prisoners on average per day, according to the mayor’s office, and a key part of his plan involves driving down New York’s overall prison population.
The roadmap includes a $30 million investment over three years to support that effort, with the goal of reducing the city’s daily jail population to 7,000 within five years, and an ultimate reduction to 5,000 detainees.
In order to reduce jail numbers, officials will need to reign in jail admissions as well as length of stay.
Officials plan to expand supervised release programs, offer community service alternatives to jail for individuals with sentences under 30 days and facilitate bail payments.
De Blasio, who is running for re-election this year, anticipates this reduction would allow the city to shut down the prison within a decade.
“We are not offering a quick fix,” the mayor said in a statement. “Rikers Island cannot be closed overnight.”
But it “is a key piece of creating a smaller, safer and fairer criminal justice system in New York City,” he said.
The city will also have to shore up facilities off the island and build new ones, a politically heated topic among concerned neighborhoods.
In the meantime, the city plans to improve transparency and safety at all jails by installing full camera coverage and piloting a new electronic grievance system for detainees to report issues and service requests.
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