In its latest report, even the Lippman Commission admits the Rikers Island prison complex can’t close by 2027, but the reality-denying City Council refuses to admit it.
The first of the replacement jails won’t finish before 2029 (if ever), and all four together couldn’t remotely handle the current Rikers population of 7,000-plus inmates.
The de Blasio era law requiring City Hall to close the 15,000-bed jail complex in two years has run head-on into community opposition to the borough-based jails, plus the endless delays that are routine in any large New York government project.
Indeed, as we noted in January, “with every contract City Hall signs for new jails to replace Rikers, the completion date gets further and further away.”
The $3.8 million Chinatown jail is now supposedly slated to complete in 2032, the Bronx and Queens ones in 2031 and the Brooklyn facility in 2029.
Yet Council Speaker Adrienne Adams refuses to even amend the law to admit those realities, as Mayor Eric Adams requests.
How can anyone take her run for mayor seriously?
Or the rest of the 2025 Democratic mayoral pack; they’re all just as delusional.
The only sane answer is to just build new jails on Rikers Island, and transfer inmates as practical.
The insistence on sticking with the deadline to close Rikers years before the city has anywhere else to put 7,000 dangerous people is the perfect sign of just how deranged you have to be to remain a New York City progressive.
