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Last week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani doubled down on an impossible promise.
In October 2019, the City Council passed a law that banned the use of any part of Rikers Island to house incarcerated persons after Aug. 31, 2027.
But under current circumstances, that closure plan violates state law.
Under the plan, the city must replace the jails on Rikers with “borough-based” facilities in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx.
Yet construction on these new jails, now expected to cost a stunning $13.7 billion, has barely begun.
Groundbreaking for the first of the facilities, in Brooklyn, was accomplished just this month.
It’s scheduled for completion in 2029 — two years after the Rikers closure deadline.
The other three jails won’t be completed until 2032, at best.
When Mamdani toured Bellevue Hospital’s new ward for inmates on Tuesday, he cheered the $241 million site as a “major step” that “begins the process of closing Rikers Island once and for all.”
He admitted, though, that the legal deadline is “practically impossible to fulfill,” blaming his predecessor’s “lack of interest” in following the closure law.
Rather than forging ahead with shuttering the nearly century-old jail complex, however, the mayor should take the opportunity to pause and reconsider the entire plan.
First, he should ask the City Council to repeal the law’s ticking closure clock.
The arbitrary deadline isn’t tethered to the reality of nonexistent new facilities — and that makes it illegal.
Under New York state’s Correction Law, a municipal government can’t close an operating local jail unless and until it provides a functional replacement.
Those facilities must be “designated or erected” to serve as its new “local correctional facility,” the statute states.
The City Council thus has no power to close Rikers unless adequate and functional replacement jails are already in place.
The mayor and the council must further correct the most alarming aspect of the closure plan — its reckless and illegal reduction in the city’s capacity to hold inmates.
The Rikers jail complex, which can hold nearly 15,000 detainees, now houses about 7,000, a relatively low number historically.
During the early 1990s, for example, Rikers housed over 20,000 people.
Combined, the four borough-based jails will have the capacity to hold about 4,000 inmates.
The city has never held so few people in detention, except briefly during the 2020 pandemic.
The city’s Rikers-closure website describes the purpose of the closure plan succinctly: “New York is leading a historic decarceration plan to close Rikers Island and replace it with a smaller network of safer modern jails.”
In other words: Deliberately build too little jail capacity, and force the city to shrink the incarcerated population.
But state law doesn’t permit any city or county to construct jails that lack adequate capacity to carry out their basic functions.
The Correction Law mandates that local jails “shall be used” for the “detention” of those held for trial, and for the “confinement” of persons convicted of crimes.
Likewise, the state’s Criminal Procedure Law governs bail and sentencing.
When a judge elects to hold a defendant charged with a felony in custody pending trial, that defendant is committed “to the custody of the sheriff” — meaning the Department of Correction.
Certain convicts are required by law to be so “commit.”
The local jail, therefore, must by law have the capacity reasonably necessary to perform its mandatory function of fulfilling judicial bail and sentencing orders.
Closing Rikers would leave the judiciary without sufficient detention capacity to carry out its powers and duties.
If the city can’t comply with lawful judicial orders, judges could hold the city in contempt of court.
More practically, though, the inadequate capacity would force the courts to release defendants who would otherwise face confinement.
Compulsory decarceration would become a permanent feature of the city’s criminal-justice system.
It’s time for Mamdani and the City Council to face facts.
Now that the mayor has joined Speaker Julie Menin in conceding that Rikers can’t close by the 2027 deadline, both sides of City Hall have an opportunity to reconsider the plan from the ground up.
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and the five county district attorneys should seize the chance to explain how closing Rikers would make their jobs harder — and perhaps impossible.
And all New Yorkers who care about public safety should demand that their elected officials fix the city’s jail complex, not replace it.
The city now operates Rikers under the auspices of a federally appointed “remediation manager” with the power to help enact necessary reforms.
Instead of spending billions on new jails in neighborhoods like Chinatown and Kew Gardens, we should modernize the existing facilities, making them safe and humane.
The city’s present plan is unworkable, illegal — and must be abandoned.
Christian Browne is an attorney and adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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