CB2 committee OKs jail plan
Members vote in favor of plan to tear down Atlantic Ave. detention center
COURIER L 4 IFE, APRIL 26–MAY 2, 2019 PS
2019 * plus tax and season pass.
2019 * plus tax and season pass.
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
Members of Community
Board 2’s Land Use Committee
voted in favor of Mayor
Bill de Blasio’s plan to tear
down Atlantic Avenue’s
House of Detention to make
way for a larger jail in order
to close down Rikers Island.
The committee issued its
recommendation at an April 16
meeting to accept the city’s proposal
to close the beleaguered
jail complex by 2027 and move
its incarcerated people to four
borough-based jails with several
conditions, including lowering
the city’s target population
and cutting the building’s
proposed size by almost half.
The group’s conditions
came from a list of amendments
which the infl uential
civic group Brooklyn Heights
Association distributed as
a leafl et at the meeting and
which a member of both the
association and the committee
voted to include in the
recommendation.
The conditions are that
the city construct a building
slightly more than half the
fl oor area ratio compared to the
city’s proposal, with no more
than 875 incarcerated people
in it, as opposed to 1,437.
The community board also
said that the city must expand
its alternative sentencing programs,
create an improved
training facility for guards,
and build a jail on Staten Island
— the only borough exempt
from the mayor’s plan.
Several representatives
from the mayor’s offi ce and the
Department of Correction presented
their plans for the new
jail between Boerum Place and
Smith Street to the committee,
similarly to the community
board’s packed public hearing
on April 11.
Many committee members
asked the bureaucrats why
they didn’t readjust their proposal
in light of recent legislative
changes in Albany with
one civic guru accusing the
city of trying to strong-arm the
local community into accepting
larger jails in order to close
Rikers.
“You’re proposing a building
that — I think by-and-large
you’ve heard from everyone
that testifi ed — is too big,” said
Irene Janner. “You’re trying
to fast-track this and you leave
us in a quandary of do we vote
yes and hope you shrink it,
or do we insist you shrink it
now because we know it is not
acceptable as presented.”
State legislators passed a
sweeping package of reforms
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 of fi ve people
detained pretrial in the
fi ve boroughs would have been
released under the new laws.
The mayor’s offi ce launched
a feasibility study to explore
moving mentally ill inmates to
hospitals, which could further
reduce the population in the
borough jails, as fi rst reported
by The City.
Brooklyn District Attorney
Eric Gonzalez also announced
that his offi ce would reduce excessive
incarceration under his
Justice 2020 plan in March.
A senior representative for
the mayor’s Offi ce of Criminal
Justice Initiatives told the committee
that her team wanted to
guarantee that no one would be
left behind on Rikers Island if
the new facilities ended up being
too small, which led them
to aim for 5,000 incarcerated
people in accordance with the
2017 fi ndings of the independent
commission on the city’s
incarceration reform led by
Judge Jonathan Lippman.
“We are committed to not
leaving anyone on Rikers Island.
So what we don’t want
to do is in trying to plan for
what is not reasonable for us
to achieve while we continue
to push in every way shape and
form that we can to make sure
that everybody we can get out
of detention is in communitybased
supervision or not in
the justice system,” said Dana
Kaplan.
HOUSE OF YES: Community Board
2’s Land Use Committee issued its
recommendation at a recent meeting
to accept the city’s proposal to
close Rikers Island, which will mean
changes for the Brooklyn House of
Detention. Photo by Zoe Freilich