New York’s Q100 bus takes just five minutes to carry visitors and corrections officers across a bridge to one of the nation’s most infamous jail complexes. When they arrive, Rikers Island can feel like a different world.
Zohran Mamdani’s election last week as mayor of New York City — its youngest since 1892 — is likely to bring an end to this isolated world. Mamdani has vowed to follow through with a plan that legally mandates Rikers’ closure by 2027, replacing the carceral island with four smaller jails across the city.
The Borough-Based Jails (BBJ) program has faced multiple delays and controversy. But for Mamdani, closing Rikers could just be the start. In what could serve as a model for the nation, he promises a significant shift in the justice system that could keep more people out of jail altogether.
A commitment to close Rikers
Weeks before the 34-year-old was easily elected mayor of the nation’s largest city, he sat before a crowd at Columbia Journalism School, fielding rapid-fire questions from local news anchor Errol Louis.
Among the questions: What would be Mamdani’s approach to Rikers Island?
“I’ve visited Rikers a few times, and one of the last times I went, there was an incarcerated New Yorker that tried to take their own life,” Mamdani said. “The despair on Rikers Island has been well known to many of us for quite some time. And yet it is despair that’s only been heightened under this current administration.”
Mamdani promised to close Rikers by 2027, the year mandated in a law passed by New York City’s City Council in 2019.
“My commitment will be to do everything in my power from the very beginning to follow that [Rikers closure] law and to ensure that we reduce the jail population,” Mamdani said.
His position put him in direct conflict with his closest rival for the mayor’s job, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who proposed keeping Rikers Island open, although with major renovations. Unlike Cuomo, Mamdani committed to following through with plans to build new jails in four of the city’s five boroughs: the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens.
Mamdani’s commitments
Mamdani has plans that extend outside the jail walls. His goals: to reduce inflated jail populations, make New York safer and launch a new city department that, he says, would prevent violence and incarceration in the first place.
“As soon as you set foot in a jail, your likelihood of recidivism increases,” Mamdani said at Columbia.
“We can no longer be at ease with Rikers Island being the largest mental health facility in New York City and the second largest in the country, where 40% is diagnosed with having SMI — serious mental illness,” he said. “If you have such a large population of New Yorkers with SMI on Rikers Island, you then have to ask what is the best way of actually engaging and dealing with SMI?”
He wants to create a civilian Department of Community Safety (DCS), which would invest $1.1 billion in prevention, outreach programs and other initiatives. It would redirect calls from the New York Police Department, which is often not equipped to deal with mental health issues, to qualified mental health experts.
“The department’s mission is to ‘prevent violence before it happens’ by addressing root causes such as poverty, mental illness, housing instability and inequality,” Sarah Roebuck wrote for Corrections 1. “The DCS, he says, will take a public health approach to crime prevention, prioritizing ‘prevention-first, community-based solutions.’”
Mamdani’s plan calls for expanding emergency teams that respond to mental health crises and new community mental health “navigators” who will connect residents to care, potentially reducing mental-health calls to 911. He also wants to increase funding for gun violence prevention by 275% and to spend more on victim services and anti-hate education programs.
Leaning on peer-led rehabilitative centers for New Yorkers with serious mental illnesses is one way Mamdani suggests bringing incarceration rates down and reducing violence. He cites the nonprofit Fountain House as an example.
“They have been proven to reduce hospitalization by up to 45%, increase employment rates by 50%, decrease loneliness by 56%, and actually reduce the cost of Medicaid when used for those members by more than 20%,” Mamdani told the crowd at Columbia.
He compared it to the costs of keeping someone at Rikers Island. “The cost for an entire year’s worth of service is $4,000. That is three days on Rikers Island,” he said. “How does it make sense that we’re willing to invest in this but not invest in this?”
A shift from ‘tough on crime’
Since Mayor Eric Adams took office in 2022, at least 42 people have died on Rikers Island. Under Adams, the average stay at Rikers grew from 91 to 100 days. As in other jails around the U.S., most of those locked up at Rikers are waiting for court dates — sometimes for months, sometimes for years.
It is undeniably a costly system.
The cost to incarcerate a person at Rikers for one year runs to $556,539, according to New York City’s Comptroller’s Office
“You have people who have waited two years for a trial,” Mamdani said. “How does that make any sense? It’s not a question of fiscal imperatives because it costs the city more than $500,000 a year to keep someone on Rikers Island.”
Adams, a veteran police officer, took a tough-on-crime approach to New York, hiring more officers at the nation’s largest police department. Unlike his predecessor, Mamdani promises to keep police staffing levels flat, with NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch remaining at the helm.
Under Adams, the incarcerated population surpassed 7,000 people, far more than under former Mayor Bill de Blasio. Under de Blasio, the Rikers’ population dropped to under 4,000, the lowest since 1946.
This growing population presents a complex issue for myriad reasons. Chief among them is that the new Borough-Based Jails are supposed to contain a total of 4,160 beds.
Mamdani originally opposed spending $16 billion on the Borough-Based Jails program, and he was far from alone. From the start, the program has faced backlash, construction delays and controversy. Critics say the city doesn’t need expensive new jails, but rather more programs, prevention and affordable housing.
Mamdani changed his tune. While he supports the new jails, he says his new Department of Community Safety will focus on what New Yorkers need, helping prevent incarceration and violence in the first place.
He also promises to engage with New Yorkers and community groups that oppose the Borough-Based Jails plan.
“Neighbors United Below Canal will continue to advance our alternative plan that addresses the need to close Rikers while creating hundreds of units of affordable housing at … the current site of the Manhattan Borough-Based Jail,” Jan Lee, co-founder of advocacy group Neighbors United Below Canal, which opposes the new Manhattan jail, told Straight Arrow News. “This is a win-win proposal that relocates the BBJ where blighted government buildings in the Civic Center already stand, and provides much-needed affordable housing to Chinatown and Lower Manhattan.”
Lee added, “Two weeks ago, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani told [me] he ‘doesn’t want opinions and skepticism to preclude meeting.’ We welcome that spirit of open dialogue, especially now as the bulldozers are at the gate.”
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