That is at the heart of a plan for a landmark overhaul of New York City’s corrections system, which will culminate with the closing of Rikers Island, the jail complex with nearly 10,000 beds that has become notorious for chronic abuse, neglect and mismanagement.
The City Council approved the proposal Thursday, a decision that seemed nearly impossible just a few years ago and that supporters say immediately places New York City at the forefront of a national movement to reverse decades of mass incarceration that disproportionately affected black and Hispanic people.
Mayor Bill de Blasio and Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, embraced the jails plan, throwing their political weight behind the momentous reforms despite steady opposition from neighborhoods whose residents worry that the towering jails will harm their quality of life.
“What we are doing today will reshape the city for generations to come and impact the lives of every New Yorker,” Johnson said Thursday. “For decades, our city was unfair to those who became involved in the justice system, and the overwhelmingly majority who were caught up were black and brown men.”
But now, the hard part begins. To meet its deadline of 2026, the city will have to build four new jails scattered in neighborhoods across the city, shut down a 400-acre jail network on an island in the East River, and relocate thousands of prisoners and corrections officers.
The transition and new construction also carries a hefty price tag: more than $8 billion.
The city may also find itself having to fend off the legal challenges that are often mounted when neighborhoods oppose major developments.
In a sign perhaps of the challenges and opposition ahead, Councilman Carlos Menchaca, who represents parts of Brooklyn, said the legislation did not go far enough to address the reasons people end up in jail.
“This vote only enriches developers in the short term, while leaving the fate of Rikers in the hands of a future mayor and a future Council,” said Menchaca, who voted against the proposal. “I do not trust this mayor, do you?”
To make the plan a reality, city officials must place their trust in future elected leaders to share the same vision and see it through on the same aggressive timeline. It also depends on further declines in the city’s crime rate, which by some measures is already the lowest since the 1950s.
Today, the city’s jails hold about 7,000 people every day — about a third of the population when it reached its peak during the crack cocaine epidemic in the early 1990s. The new jails, however, would not have room even for the number of prisoners today.
The city announced this week that the new facilities will be smaller than first anticipated with a combined daily capacity of about 3,300 prisoners. The jails will be about the same size — each with 886 beds — and will require reducing the jail population by more than half by 2026.
The Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, which represents more than 10,000 correction officers in the city, has criticized the projected number of prisoners as unrealistically optimistic.
The City Council’s minority leader, Steven Matteo, said Thursday he had concerns over what it would take for the city to reach the goal of 3,300 prisoners.
“It will require putting more potentially dangerous offenders back on the street, jeopardizing public safety,” said Matteo, a Republican from Staten Island who voted “no.”
When the new jails open, officials said, they will be safer, smaller and more humane and will make New York’s corrections system a model for the rest of the country. Prisoners will be provided job training, mental health counseling and education services.
“I have been to Rikers. I have been to the Kew Gardens jail,” said Karen Koslowitz, a councilwoman who represents the area of Queens that would get a new jail. “They weren’t cells. They were cages.”
Before the vote Thursday, Johnson said that years of declining crime rates show that the prisoner population would continue to drop and that the new jails would meet future needs.
“We feel confident this is the right size,” he said.
Smaller jails are possible, city leaders say, because of changes by New York state and the city to reduce the number of people sent to jail.
In recent years, New York state repealed the Rockefeller Laws, the 1970s antidrug legislation that established mandatory minimum prison sentences for nonviolent, low-level drug offenders. New laws go into effect in January that will outlaw cash bail for most people charged with misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, and will require prosecutors to give evidence to the defense far earlier.
New York City has banned solitary confinement for people under 22 years old, expanded diversion programs that keep people out of jail and did away with arrests for most people found with small amounts of marijuana.
As part of the jail plan, the city also announced $265 million in new spending on efforts intended to keep people out of jail and to support those who have been released.
It would include an expansion of the supervised release program, which allows defendants to wait for trial outside jail; conflict-resolution lessons in schools; and transitional employment opportunities for inmates upon release.
This article originally appeared in
.