If the next mayor of New York City is really serious about reducing crime, he must keep Rikers Island open and rebuild the jails there. The city’s current plan to close Rikers involves the building of four skyscraper jails in four boroughs, housing a maximum of just 3,300 inmates. This isn’t nearly an adequate number to keep this city safe.
The 3,300 inmate capacity the city is planning for cannot even handle the current population on Rikers, which stands at about 5,900. Thirty years ago, city jails held more than 22,000 inmates. Four years ago, because of falling crime, there were 9.400. Then, in 2017 the city embarked on an ambitious program to reduce the Rikers population through lower bail, and new alternatives to bail, such as supervised release. From 2017 to 2020, the average daily population on Rikers fell from 9,152 in 2017, to just 4,471 in 2020, the vast majority of the releases coming in 2019 and 2020 as a result of COVID emergency releases and bail reform. Today, in the midst of the uptick in crime, the decline of COVID and a modest revision of the bail laws, there are still nearly 6,000 inmates in custody.
Those prisoner releases haven’t helped contain crime in a city in which murder has gone up 37.2%, shootings are up 105.4%, burglary is up 11.9%, and car theft is up 99.6% in just the last two years. Yet the city plans to reduce the inmate population by more than 2,000 additional inmates — which is likely to increasingly include people prone to violence, as the lower-hanging fruit has already been let out — to reach their self-imposed, arbitrary limit of 3,300.
Can you imagine what the release of these additional inmates will do to crime in NYC? The single worst thing that the city could do would be to set an artificially low cap on the number of jail cells available to house criminals. In addition, once city officials close and “re-purpose” Rikers, there will be no more space to build additional cells when crime goes up. (Turns out, contrary to those who began to believe it would be perpetually on the downward slope, violence in the city can rise as well as fall.)
In pushing to close Rikers, the anti-Rikers advocates claimed that the jail population could be safely reduced by releasing “low-level” misdemeanor defendants and “non-violent” offenders pre-trial. They were wrong; crime in NYC began to rise with the enactment of the new bail laws, which were designed to reduce the jail population. Those laws — or the first iteration of them, anyway — became effective on Jan. 1, 2020, but judges started applying them in October 2019. Car thieves, burglars, drug dealers, robbers and career shoplifters were released by the hundreds rather than going to jail.
By the end of February 2020, burglary was up 19.1%, robbery rose 32.7%, grand larceny went up 23.9%, transit crime went up 40.7%, and car thefts soared 61.6% year to date over the same period in 2019. Overall city crime went up 22.5% in just those two months. That was after the bail-reform-required releases, but before anybody was released because of COVID.
You simply cannot make New York safe if you keep releasing career criminals from jail.
The cost of closing Rikers and building new jails is almost $9 billion ($2.7 million per inmate). This is enough money to rehabilitate 50,000 NYCHA apartments at $180,000 each.
Look what is happening now with the rise in crime. People are afraid to ride the subways. Daylight shootings and robberies cause fear in neighborhoods and tourist areas. When people are afraid to venture out at night, businesses suffer, neighborhoods decline. Then there is the human cost. By this time in 2019, 164 people had been murdered. In 2020, the number soared to 226. So far this year, the number of dead rose even higher to 233.
Advocates posit the issue as binary: Either you build the four new community jails or you keep Rikers as it is. This is a false choice. Rikers Island is more than 400 acres. The standard in prison construction is to build low-rise facilities, with open-air areas and large open interior spaces, not skyscrapers. We could use those 400 acres to create a world-class jail with innovative treatment, training and mental health and rehabilitative services, all in one place. We could start re-building that facility now, without community opposition, lawsuits and inevitable building delays and cost overruns associated with erecting vertical jails in some of the most congested areas of the city.
And its population wouldn’t be arbitrarily capped.
If we truly want to re-imagine incarceration, our leaders need to think logically and not be trapped in the chants and slogans of the past. Keep Rikers open and keep New York safe. Otherwise, a future mayor will be given the option of trying to house 8,000 inmates in the 3,300 beds which Mayor de Blasio left us with, or releasing them into the general population, with obvious, awful consequences.
Quinn was executive assistant district attorney of Queens under Judge Richard A. Brown.