A Broken System

I’m a big midnight snacker. Unfortunately, I’m not exactly covert, and my parents have caught me scouring the kitchen pantry well past midnight more times than I’d like to admit. Being the good Samaritan that I am, I always confess to my crimes, guilty as charged. While my midnight crimes end in confessions, the atrocities committed against those incarcerated on Rikers Island end far more seriously. To understand them, we first have to examine the history of the island.

Rikers Island is a jail intended for short-term use, primarily holding individuals awaiting trial. The establishment is notoriously regarded as extremely dilapidated and dysfunctional, and it has been shrouded in controversy over brutality and negligence since its opening. Interestingly enough, the jail found its beginnings during the Great Depression, at a time when the majority of those being held were young men unable to pay bail on low-level offenses. What’s worse, the jail opened specific units designated to hold LGBTQ+ community members in 1971. As the Center for Justice Innovation quantifies, “85 percent of the population on Rikers is presumed innocent and waiting, generally for months, for their day in court.” This lengthy wait only increases the cost per capita for incarceration, which proves two things: first, that such funding should instead be invested in fostering safer neighborhoods, and second, that it’s in the interest of the public to reduce the number of wrongful arrests.

The closure of Rikers Island is decades overdue. To address this, former NYC mayor Bill de Blasio passed a jail restructuring proposal known as the Borough-Based Jail Program (BBJ) in 2017. This program aims to replace Rikers Island with four new jails, each located in one of NYC’s boroughs, excluding Staten Island. The BBJ’s implementation, however, has proven disastrous. The project was originally projected to cost $8 billion, but recently, not only have costs risen to $13 billion, but the new jails’ opening has been postponed by several years. Even worse, “Rikers’ current population of about 6,700 inmates surpasses the 4,100-bed capacity of the new facilities,” as per CBS News. Shortfalls in capacity mean that many incarcerated individuals would be released without receiving the rehabilitation or resources that they need, making local communities less safe. With the current number of issues the BBJ has run into, it is clear that the ballooning budget of this program should instead be redirected into benefiting local communities. 

Located in Chinatown, the Manhattan District Jail in particular has failed to account for its local community’s needs. After repeatedly requesting inclusion in the planning process and design of the Manhattan District Jail, local Chinatown residents, architects, and elected officials proposed relocating the Manhattan jail altogether and, instead, converting the current jail space into affordable housing and a public plaza. The need for affordable housing in Chinatown becomes apparent when you look at the numbers: median rent in the Lower East Side and Chinatown increased by 20.4 percent from 2006-2022, yet median household income increased by only three percent. Additionally, the area known as the “Chinatown Core,” including the jail site, is one of the lowest-income areas across NYC. 

The Chinatown community’s proposal and the failures of the BBJ actually shift attention in the right direction. District jails are an inefficient stopgap solution to a much larger problem within the jail system. Greater incarceration does not increase community safety. Money should be invested in communities, not incarceration. Incarceration actually benefits private companies the most because private subcontractors for government-operated jails profit per additional incarcerated individual. It’s in their interest to encourage arrests, valid or not.

Many of the individuals being incarcerated are young adolescents with no conviction, the vast majority of whom simply cannot afford bail. Bail is only offered for minor offenses in the first place, and does not warrant months of waiting for minor infractions. Such delays point to a slow and ineffective legislative process. And while there is currently no formally established arrest quota within the NYPD, various lawsuits and investigations point to the fact that there are still implicit quotas expected of officers. 

The alternative to the BBJ solves the majority of the problems the BBJ currently raises. During mayoral campaigning in 2025, Andrew Cuomo claimed he would dismantle the BBJ in favor of the reconstruction of Rikers Island. This backup plan would revamp Rikers into a humane correctional center, complete with all the necessary facilities: courthouses, rehabilitation programs, family centers, and even sports facilities. Keeping all the necessary resources “in-house” would solve many of the problems that the current BBJ raises, including its astronomical budget, and would provide for a much better bang for the taxpayers’ buck. The plan would also incur similar benefits: proximity to jails, which was cited as a reason for the BBJ program, would be equivalently reduced, and rehabilitation access would be greater and higher quality. Even the buildings themselves would instead be low-rise, and unlike the proposed district high-rises, would not dominate the cityscape. A reimagined Rikers would mean a safer and more efficient New York.

Creating change in a system as complex as that of New York City is no easy feat. The Borough-Based Jail plan started out with the best of intentions, but the issues it has brought up leave room for a longer conversation about what jail reform in New York City should look like.