Pols, activists slam city’s jail plan
Opponents say incarcerated population must be reduced before relocation
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
COURIER LIFE, A PS PRIL 19–25, 2019 3
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
They need to try harder!
The city must reduce the
number of incarcerated people
it plans to move into boroughbased
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, 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-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 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 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 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
b or ou ghbased
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.”