Photo Courtesy of Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office
Mayor Bill de Blasio has said that closing the jails on Rikers Island for good requires a daily jail population of just 5,000.
By Forum Staff
For the first time in history, the City has a plan to close Rikers Island.
And according to the de Blasio administration, it will be completed “by making jails smaller, safer and fairer.”
The first step, according to the City, is to continue to reduce the size of the jail population, which today makes closure impossible. The current citywide jail population is around 9,400, and there is capacity to house only 2,300 in existing facilities in the boroughs. By 2021, through implementing new strategies to reduce the number of people who enter jail and how long they stay, the City’s goal is to reduce the average daily jail population by 25 percent to 7,000 people. With 7,000 individuals in jails, the City will be using jail almost exclusively for individuals facing serious charges or who pose a high risk–making further safe reductions difficult. Closing the jails on Rikers Island for good requires a daily jail population of just 5,000, and to get there the City has pledged to work with every part of the criminal justice system to develop strategies to further reduce violent crime and address the problem of chronic offending, which to date has been intractable nationwide.
“The plan we’ve put forward would speed efforts, whether it’s bail reform, alternatives to incarceration – a number of things, obviously first and foremost driving down crime so fewer and fewer people are arrested, fewer people are going into the justice system,” de Blasio said. “We fundamentally believe we have to get to 5,000 inmates in our jail systems to be able to close Rikers once and for all, but we believe it can be done with all of these tools. In the meantime, we have to take better care of the inmates who are on Rikers now and also have to protect the officers who are there now.”
In addition to reducing the number of daily inmates by about 25 percent, the City is proposing:
Humane and productive conditions for staff and incarcerated individuals
• Bring all existing jails, both on- and off-Island, to state of good repair within the next five years
• Improve officer safety by build a new training academy to ensure all corrections officers receive best possible training
• Triple the number of dedicated housing units designed for individuals with serious mental illness, which have been shown to reduce violence
• Promote safety by ensuring full camera coverage in all city jails by end of 2017
Change the culture inside jails
to better support officers
and create pathways
to stability for detainees
• Everyone in city custody will be offered five hours per day of education, vocational, and therapeutic programming by end of 2018
• Help incarcerated individuals serving a city sentence re-enter society with support by trained, formerly incarcerated mentors; transitional employment; higher education
• Foster connections to families and community by improving visitation
• Further reduce punitive segregation
• Better support correctional officers by offering peer mentoring for new recruits to reduce attrition and supportive services for staff to deal with distress and trauma
