In 2019, the New York City Council and then-mayor Bill de Blasio set a deadline for closing the jail facilities on Rikers Island. As part of that plan, the council authorized the construction of four “borough-based jails”—one in each borough, except Staten Island—and passed a resolution barring the operation of any facility on Rikers Island for the “incarceration of individuals after December 31, 2026.” In 2021, the council effectively extended the closure deadline to August 2027.
Pointing to the “stipulated timeline,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani has said he will seek to close Rikers accordingly.
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Incoming council speaker Julie Menin, by contrast, acknowledged in an interview with the New York Post that while she supports the closure, “there have been enormous delays in the construction of the borough-based jails” that the council will need to “address.”
The new speaker’s concerns are valid. Fortunately for her, state law renders the city’s closure deadline unenforceable and gives the council a basis to adjust the plan to comply with the law—and practical reality.
The New York State Correction Law governs all “local correctional facilities” and trumps inconsistent local laws. Section 500-a(3) of the law mandates that “buildings, now used as jails of the counties of the state, shall continue to be the jails of those counties respectively, until other buildings have been” legally “designated or erected for that purpose.” (Though this section refers to “counties,” by express definition, it applies to the City of New York.) It sensibly mandates that, once a local jail is operative, the local government cannot close it without providing a functional replacement.
The city is now in the early stages of constructing the borough-based jails, none of which will be completed by the 2027 deadline to close Rikers. The first of the new jails, in Brooklyn, won’t be erected until 2029. The others won’t be ready until after 2030. Until the new facilities are operative, the state’s Correction Law requires the Rikers facilities to “continue to be the jails” of the city.
The borough-based jail plan raises a second and related legal issue: insufficient capacity. The Rikers jail complex can hold nearly 15,000 inmates. At present, approximately 7,000 people are incarcerated on the island, a relatively low number historically. During the early 1990s crime spike, for example, Rikers housed over 20,000 people.
Combined, the four borough-based jails will have capacity for about 4,000 inmates. The city has never held so few people in detention, except briefly during the Covid-19 response in 2020.
The borough-based jails will not be like-kind replacements for Rikers. They will hold only about half of its present, relatively low population—not by mistake, but because of activists’ plan to leave the city with “dramatically reduced” jail capacity.
In fact, the borough-based jails are deliberately designed to force “decarceration.” The Department of Correction’s website leaves no doubt: “New York is leading a historic decarceration plan to close Rikers Island and replace it with a smaller network of safer modern jails.”
The state’s criminal-justice laws do not sanction decarceration-by-jail-closure. New York State’s Penal Law sets forth criminal offenses and the sentences that may be imposed upon conviction. The state’s Criminal Procedure Law governs bail and sentencing. A felony defendant whom a judge elects to hold in custody, pending trial, is committed “to the custody of the sheriff”—meaning, in Gotham, the Department of Correction. Certain convicts are required by law to be “commit[ted]” to the city’s Department of Correction.
The Correction Law assigns mandatory functions to county jails. These facilities “shall be used” for, among other things, the “detention” of persons held for trial and for the “confinement” of persons convicted of crimes who are required by the court to serve their sentences in the local jail.
Because these functions are mandatory, it would be unlawful for the city to design its local jails in a way that guarantees they will be incapable of carrying out their designated purposes under state law. By law, local jails secure defendants assigned to the Department of Correction’s custody. If the city cannot accommodate the number of persons remanded to the department’s custody, the only practical alternative will be to release defendants who otherwise would be sent to jail or those already serving short-term sentences at Rikers.
Local jails exist to facilitate, not frustrate, the proper operation of the criminal-justice system. The city may not achieve a policy end—“decarceration”—by constructing jail facilities that cannot carry out their legally mandated purposes. The plan for construction of the borough-based jails, as presently constituted, is therefore illegal.
The new mayor and speaker must re-evaluate the plans for Rikers’ replacement and consider amendments to the local laws governing the closure process. At a minimum, if the city insists on shuttering Rikers, it must do so in a way that complies with state law.
Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images