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Several obstacles stand in the way of closing the Rikers Island jails by 2027 as mandated by law, the city’s correction commissioner told the City Council on Thursday.
The most significant challenge is that the growing number of detainees incarcerated at the jails is too high for them to be moved to four other facilities scattered throughout the city, whose combined capacity is smaller, Correction Commissioner Louis Molina said.
Another hurdle is the timeline for completing one of those new jails: a $3 billion facility in Brooklyn, which is now slated for 2029, according to the city record. Molina attributed the delay in part to supply chain delays due to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
Finally, a plan to reduce the jails population by moving seriously ill detainees to secure units at two city hospitals is likewise behind schedule because Molina ordered changes to the design of those units for security reasons in order to comply with state law.
At the hearing, held to examine the correction department’s budget, Molina got into a back-and-forth with Councilmember Jen Gutiérrez, who accused him of intentionally keeping the population above the 3,300 threshold needed to close Rikers.
“It feels like you are actively standing in the way of depleting the population,” Gutiérrez said. “It feels like you want to actually expand it to hold onto it.”
Molina replied: “You are very wrong. I don’t have the power to depopulate persons that are placed in our custody that are pretrial detainees.”
Molina said one way to get the population low enough in order to close Rikers would be to expand the capacity of mental health beds in the city. That’s because about half of the Rikers population has been diagnosed with a mental illness, with 18% of detainees diagnosed with what is considered serious mental illness. Some of those people do not need to be behind bars, he said.
Molina also attributed the steady increase in the Rikers population since he was appointed by Mayor Eric Adams last year to a slow judicial system that leads people to languish in jail while awaiting court dates. He said one man who was awaiting sentencing for a murder conviction spent six years in all at the Rikers jails, which are intended for temporary stays. Most people there have been charged with crimes, but not convicted.
Councilmembers pointed out that part of the delay in the courts may be because the correction department is failing to get many detainees to their hearings, as Gothamist reported last month. Molina attributed that to a new phenomenon: hundreds of detainees each month who simply refuse transport to courthouses for their hearings and trials. The reasons they give include religious exemptions and medical issues, he said.
“What I will not do, which was a practice of the past, is have our staff engage into physical confrontations to bring these individuals into court — absent a securing-force order from a judge,” Molina said. In February, he said, 789 people at Rikers refused to go to court.
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