April 19–25, 2019 Brooklyn Paper • www.BrooklynPaper.com • (718) 260-2500 AWP 17
JAIL...
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tal health issues, drug-related
problems, and complex medical
needs off site in or near
city hospitals.
If these plans reduce
the amount of incarcerated
people the department has
to rehouse, they won’t need
to tear down Atlantic Avenue’s
House of Detention
to build a new 395-foottall
jail with 1,437 beds, according
to another state
representative.
“For those of you who
think we don’t need any
new jails, we sure don’t need
the one in Brooklyn to double
in size,” said state Sen.
Velmanette Montgomery (DBoerum
Hill). “Whatever else
your plan does and doesn’t
include, it should not include
a 40-story building, or even
a 36 one.”
Councilman Steven Levin
(D–Boerum Hill) said the
proposed plans for the Kings
County facility were out of
proportion with the neighborhood
and the mayor’s
goals to make a significant
dent in the number of jailed
New Yorkers.
“It is obviously, as proposed,
way too big, it’s so
far out of context,” he said.
“We should not build excess
capacity. If we want to have a
THE CITY CLERK
OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
NOTICE OF SPECIAL ELECTION
45TH COUNCILMANIC DISTRICT
Pursuant to provisions of Section 25(b)(1) of
the Charter of the City of New York, notice
is hereby given that a special election will
be held in the Borough of Brooklyn,
County of Kings on, Tuesday, May 14,
2019, between the hours of 6:00 AM and
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Only registered voters in this district are
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For any information on whether you are eligible
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please call (212) V-0-T-E-N-Y-C. TDD for the
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Activist Albert Saint Jean slammed the city for not aiming for lower numbers
than 5,000 inmates in its plans to shut down Rikers Island.
is bigger than that.”
A representative for the
mayor’s Office of Criminal
Justice Initiatives told
the audience that they were
very supportive of the current
legislative reforms and
that they were looking to
see if they could lower their
projections.
“We are working very
closely right now to understand
what the impact will
be of these changes on the
population projections and
we’ll be able to return back
and share that,” said Dana
Kaplan. “We are optimistic
that in terms of how we will
get to reducing the population
from less than 8,000 today
to 5,000 and we’re happy
to do more and we’re very
much on track.”
One resident scalded the
city for planning to include an
underground parking garage
with 292 spaces for staff and
department vehicles despite
the many public transit options
near the building, saying
that planners could use
that space for jail facilities
instead and make the aboveground
structure smaller.
“All the subways, many
buses, they do not need 300
parking spaces,” said Michael
Levine. “They are planning
for yesterday’s needs for
tomorrow.”
During the four-hour meeting,
the community board
heard emotional testimonial
from dozens of activists and
former inmates of Rikers Island,
which it will consider
for its purely advisory vote
as part of the Uniform Land
Use Review Procedure the
city must pass before it can
break ground on the larger
site between Boerum Place
and Smith Street.
A former inmate turned
activist supported the city’s
proposal for boroughbased
jails, but told of his
harrowing experience of
incarceration in his teens.
“The Department of Correction
has destroyed my
life,” said Vidal Guzman, a
community organizer for Just
Leadership USA, an organization
that works to reduce
the incarcerated population
across the country.
Guzman said that abusive
correctional officers
traumatized him and that
he was lucky to survive his
time behind bars, unlike Kalief
Browder , a Bronx native
who died from suicide
in 2015 after spending three
years on Rikers Island after
being accused of taking
a backpack.
Another speaker denounced
the plan as not solving
the issue of mass incarceration
and said that bringing
the jails closer to the communities
alone will not guarantee
a more just system as
seen with the federal Sunset
Park prison.
“We don’t need a kinder
gentler version of mass incarceration,
we need no mass incarceration,”
said Justin Cohen.
“They said they were
going to be safer. You don’t
need to look any further than
Sunset Park where a bunch
of our neighbors were just
incarcerated and treated in
worse conditions than you
can imagine in close proximity
to all of us. We have to
imagine a system where we
don’t need 6,000 cages for
our neighbors and that’s the
conversation that we should
be having.”
FAS H ION S POTLIGHT
system that has fewer people
incarcerated, then we should
not be building a system that
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