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APRUL 21, 2019, BROOKLYN WEEKLY
Pols, activists slam city’s jail plan
Opponents say incarcerated population must be reduced before relocation
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
They need to try harder!
The city must reduce the number
of incarcerated people it plans
to move into borough-based jails
as part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s
plan to close Rikers Island, attendants
of an April 11 Community
Board 2 meeting said.
Hizzoner’s plan to close down
the beleaguered jail complex, reduce
the incarcerated population
from currently just under 8,000
people to 5,000, and relocate them
to four borough-based jails should
aim for a lower number of incarcerated
people, given the recentlypassed
reforms to the justice system
in Albany, according to one
state legislator.
“I urge the city to set a more
ambitious goal of reducing the
average daily jail population to
3,500,” Assemblywoman Jo Anne
Simon (D–Boerum Hill) said at
the meeting, which was held at
Clinton Hill’s Bishop Loughlin
Memorial High School.
State pols passed a sweeping
legislative package on April 1,
which will end cash bail and pretrial
detention for almost all misdemeanor
and nonviolent felony
defendants, among other reforms,
and which will reduce the amount
of people awaiting trial in jail because
they can’t afford bail.
The legislation will not come
into effect until Jan. 1, 2020, but a
recent study by the criminal justice
reform advocacy group the
Center for Court Innovation found
that more than two out fi ve people
detained pretrial in the fi ve boroughs
would have been released
under the new laws.
Simon cited the study and
news reports by The City that the
department as well as the Correctional
Health Services are looking
into moving incarcerated people
with mental health issues, drugrelated
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-foot-tall 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 (D–Boerum
Hill). “Whatever else your plan
OUTRAGED: Activists slammed the city for not aiming for lower numbers than 5,000 incarcerated people in its plans to shut down Rikers Island during the April 11
Community Board 2 meeting. Photo by Kevin Duggan
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 signifi cant
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 system that has fewer people incarcerated,
then we should not be
building a system that is bigger
than that.”
A representative for the mayor’s
Offi ce 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 above-ground
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 incarcerated
people 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 incarcerated
person
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
offi cers 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.”