How to Close Rikers Island

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/13/opinion/rikers-island-closing.html

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The decline in crime over the past three decades in New York City is one of the most striking examples of how a community can change the way it behaves. New Yorkers today are not as violent toward their neighbors as they were in the 1990s and commit fewer crimes. The police make fewer arrests. Prosecutors and judges divert more offenders to alternatives to jail.

The causes for the decline in crime are numerous and hotly contested. But the numbers speak for themselves: In 1990, there were 2,245 murders in the city. The last weekly report from the city lists 249 murders in 2019. That figure doesn’t include the four people killed in a shooting in Brooklyn on Saturday. Other types of violent crimes are at historical lows.

As crime has continued to plummet, the number of New Yorkers behind bars has fallen. The population of the city’s detainees peaked at more than 21,000 in 1991. This year, the population hovers around 7,100. Between 2013 and 2018, New York City’s jail population fell by more than 30 percent. (There would be even fewer people in jail were it not for the hundreds of people held on state technical parole violations who are also sent to city facilities.)

The jailed population is expected to fall even further in the coming years, after Democrats won the first clear majority in the State Legislature in decades in 2018 and approved major criminal justice reforms this year. The reforms take effect in January.

Most people charged with misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies will be released without being required to post cash bail. Judges will have the option of sending those charged with violent felonies to supervised release in some cases. Defense lawyers say that could include, for instance, a minor charged with gun possession, but not gun use. In what many experts view as the most sweeping change, the new law will require prosecutors to disclose evidence to the defense far earlier.

Owing in large part to the reforms, New York City officials project that by 2026 the city’s jails will be tasked with housing no more than 3,300 people. With that number in mind, the City Council is expected to vote this month on a plan to close the jail complex at Rikers Island completely by 2026 by sending New Yorkers instead to four jails spread across the five boroughs. The plan would be safer for inmates, safer for guards and more compassionate for the residents of a city that is playing a lead role in ending the era of mass incarceration.

Many see Rikers Island as “synonymous with brutality, incompetence, corruption and neglect,” as this page once described it. Fewer know that it was once directly associated with slavery. The island, with more than 400 acres, was named for the family of Richard Riker, a 19th-century court recorder known for zealously sending blacks south into slavery whether or not they were legally free.

Since 1935, the city has used the island to house a sprawling complex of facilities. Over the years, most of the people held on Rikers Island (in addition to three other jails in different boroughs) have been awaiting trial, meaning they haven’t been convicted of a crime. Other jail residents were serving short sentences, generally for minor crimes.

The United States incarcerates more of its citizens — both per capita and in absolute terms — than any other country in the world. Some 2.2 million people have been behind bars in the country’s prisons and jails this year.

The social and economic cost of the incarceration is high, and it has been disproportionately borne by black and Hispanic communities. Yet research strongly suggests that incarceration had little to do with the decrease in crime, and in fact may have contributed to crime. “We’ve thrown jail at every problem for so long. We know now that we were wrong,” said Scott Hechinger, senior staff attorney and director of policy at Brooklyn Defender Services. “It doesn’t enhance safety. It does the opposite, and it costs a fortune.”

Rikers continues to be a place of violence and cruelty. In 2010, a 16-year-old African-American by the name of Kalief Browder was accused of stealing a backpack, a crime he said he did not commit, and sent to Rikers. The teenager never received a trial. Yet he remained in jail for three years, including two years in solitary confinement. In 2015, two years after his release, he took his own life, after speaking openly about the trauma the ordeal had caused him.

Mr. Browder’s death galvanized the movement to close Rikers Island once and for all. For several years, Mayor Bill de Blasio resisted those calls. In 2017, the mayor — after his re-election and under enormous pressure from community groups — backed a plan to close Rikers.

Though the plan has significant support, it isn’t a sure thing. Over the past year, New Yorkers and the officials who represent them have argued over the important details of how to close the complex and what to do with the jails that would replace it.

The plan is supported by the mayor, the City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, and many criminal justice advocates. The new jails would be modern facilities closer to courthouses and communities. Many experts have said building new jails on Rikers Island is impossible, partly because it is close to the runways of La Guardia Airport, limiting the scale of development. They have also said the isolation of the island, combined with a deeply entrenched culture of corruption and violence, is reason enough to close the jails and start anew.

The plan calls for the city to spend more than $8 billion to rebuild three outdated jails, one each in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, to make them safer and more sanitary, and able to accommodate education, mental health and job training services. A fourth jail would be built in the Bronx, which never had a permanent facility, to the same standards. Staten Island would be the only borough without a jail because its residents represent a tiny portion of the city’s jail population.

There has been some community opposition to the plan in places where the jails would be built or expanded. Local officials are divided over the plan in the Bronx, where some residents have said they don’t want a jail near their homes. At community meetings in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, many residents have opposed plans to expand the existing jail. Councilman Stephen Levin, who represents the area, has signaled support for rebuilding the Brooklyn jail, but also wants investments in restorative justice programs, mental health, education and health care.

In recent months, some of the fiercest opposition has come from activists and community groups that say the city should close Rikers without building any new jails. They argue that the jail population can be reduced to tiny numbers through more criminal justice reforms, and they have called for the $8 billion-plus estimated cost of the jail plan to be spent on housing, mental health and education. “We are a group of prison industrial complex abolitionists,” said Pilar Maschi, a community organizer with No New Jails NYC, a grass-roots coalition that opposes the plan. “Moving a person from one cage to another is not satisfactory.”

Ms. Maschi, who was incarcerated on Rikers Island in the 1990s, said the goal wasn’t to release all people from jail right now, but rather to reorient the country’s focus toward resolving conflicts without using prisons.

Expressing the same interest, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents parts of the Bronx and Queens in the House, signaled that she opposed moving jails to individual boroughs. “I know the term ‘prison abolition’ is breaking some people’s brains,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter Oct. 7. “We have more than enough room to close many of our prisons and explore just alternatives to incarceration.”

There are a limited number of jail beds in New York City outside of Rikers Island. They are also in aging buildings that are dangerous for the jailed and the jailers, and they lack the needed space for programming that makes re-entry to society easier and recidivism less likely. That’s the weakness of the effort to close Rikers without building new jails. The reason to build new facilities is for the more humane confinement of people who pose a threat to their communities. We don’t know if future generations will seek to jail more New Yorkers or fewer. But infrastructure construction can both enable policy flexibility or lock in past policy preferences. The current plan to close Rikers and build modern facilities gets the balance right.

Having too few beds could lead to overcrowding if a future administration returned to policies that rely on more incarceration. Consider the Vernon C. Bain Center, a, 625-foot barge in the East River, which serves as a five-story, Dickensian floating jail for around 800 people every night. It was a temporary solution in 1992 to overcrowding in an era of mass incarceration. The Bain Center will also be shut if the Council approves the plan.

Another constituency has stubbornly argued against closing Rikers altogether. Those naysayers have included people like former Police Commissioner William Bratton. “What you have is a lot of, unfortunately in many instances, very dangerous people,” he said in 2016. “You now want to take them off an island, away from everybody, and put them into neighborhoods?”

Actually, yes. Locating modern facilities in the community is the best solution for those who are jailed and the neighborhoods they call home. Jails are not prisons, facilities built to isolate the most violent members of society for decades or lifetimes. Nearly everyone who is jailed will return to their communities, often within a year.

As the number of New Yorkers placed in city jails has shrunk, dealing with those who are jailed has become more challenging, corrections officials say. They say a larger share of the population is most likely struggling with mental illnesses, for example. This year, the rate of serious injury to those in custody as a result of violence among inmates rose by nearly 24 percent, and the rate of serious injury to correction officers from assaults by inmates rose by 37 percent, according to the Mayor’s Management Report, released last month.

Getting the jail plan approved by the City Council will require additional investments from City Hall in mental health and other services sought by communities surrounding the jails. In a change that should increase support for the plan, city officials said Friday that they had reduced the combined number of beds in the four proposed local jails to 3,795 from about 4,600. The figure includes 15 percent more beds than are likely to be necessary if the most optimistic predictions hold, to account for fluctuations in the jail population. The three existing local facilities have a combined capacity of 2,454 people.

Modern jails can be more humane jails. And it is better for New Yorkers to stay in their communities while legal proceedings are underway, rather than to be shipped to an island in the East River far from family and support networks. “We need to do this work with more compassion, more understanding,” said Capt. Justina Corporan, a senior corrections officer, while giving reporters a tour of the aging Rikers complex. “The line that separates the people on the inside from the people on the outside is thinner than anyone thinks.”

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