Photo by John Moore/Getty Images
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.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Christian Browne is an attorney and adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.