‘We will close Rikers’ — Elected officials blast back at Mayor Adams

Elected officials and advocates stood in front of City Hall on Thursday with clocks made of posterboard and started a countdown for when the city jail on Rikers Island will close: four years from today.

Or so they hope.

The rally, which officials including Public Advocate Jumaane Williams; Comptroller Brad Lander; Councilmembers Jennifer Gutiérrez, Shahana Hanif and Carlina Rivera; and Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso attended, came two days after Mayor Eric Adams urged the City Council to revisit the 2019 law requiring the closure of Rikers by 2027.

“This administration not only doesn't want to close Rikers Island, I don't think it ever had any intention to close Rikers Island,” Williams said.

On Tuesday, Adams suggested that Rikers can’t be closed because there are too many people detained there.

“So we must sit down with the City Council and lay out the facts,” Adams said during an interview with NYU law professor Ross Sandler, which was posted on YouTube. “And if the City Council with their authority is not willing to re-examine and come up with some new ways of how to resolve this…”

Adams did not finish the sentence before changing topics.

The 35-to-14 vote by the Council to close Rikers in 2019 was seen as one of the most significant victories for criminal justice reformers in over a decade. Then-Mayor Bill de Blasio declared, “This era of mass incarceration is over."

But then crime began to spike again with the COVID-19 pandemic, and the prospect of establishing four new jails in the boroughs faced significant pushback.

During this week's interview, Adams complained about the high costs of building the new jails to handle the 6,000 people currently detained in the system. He suggested that if the city must meet the 2027 deadline, then “2,000 of those people are going to be placed back into the community,” risking public safety.

But elected officials outside City Hall blamed Adams’ administration for increasing the jail's population.

“The city must make consistent investments in pretrial services, alternatives to incarceration, and re-entry services, while addressing unacceptable lengths of stay with the courts, district attorneys, and public defenders,” City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said in a statement.

According to the Vera Institute of Justice, which tracks the daily population at Rikers, roughly 1,700 people, or 25% of those detained, are there for misdemeanors or nonviolent felonies.

Lander faulted Adams for not implementing the plan that accompanied closing Rikers.

“There is a thoughtful, ambitious, really detailed plan that has a lot of critical steps,” Lander said, such as spending more on mental health, supportive housing, community release programs and speeding up court trials. “That was the plan, not just building new facilities, and those plans are not being implemented.”

Citing costs, Adams spokesperson Charles Lutvak responded on Thursday, saying the administration will always follow the law, but that “ the plan passed by the City Council during the previous administration leaves open serious questions about the city’s ability to keep New Yorkers safe.”