Now Comes the Hard Part

“Rikers Island will stand as a testament to the City’s commitment to creating a humane and rehabilitative environment, where prisoners can work, learn and prepare themselves for a better future once they have served their time.”

- Former Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, 1935

“Mass incarceration didn’t begin in New York City, but it will end here. We’re closing that jail on Rikers Island once and for all.”

- Former Mayor Bill de Blasio, March 2017

New York City jails are no strangers to reform. The problem is that those reforms have had a hard time sticking or being meaningful. A big piece of the obstacle has been politics, of both the big P and little p sort. Historically, incarcerated people have had the weakest political voice, while the unions that represent correction officers have had an outsize impact on electoral politics. Neighborhoods and the public have called for more safety but want social problems disappeared, with insufficient regard as to what happens once something is out of their backyard and into a system as opaque as incarceration. And of course, race and class have played a big part in all of this. 

I know a bit about the challenges of reform because from 2014 to 2022 I had a front row seat at the show, assigned point at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice when the latest sweeping reform movement took off — the effort to close Rikers Island. In some ways, this effort had its roots in the past, as many of the reforms of the last 50-plus years have centered on where the jails are located geographically, as well as on their physical conditions. Rikers Island had itself opened in the 1930s as the solution to the failures of a facility on another isolated island, now known as Roosevelt. By the 1950s, in a shift away from a decentralized approach, the jails on Rikers had expanded to house women and young people. By the 1970s, the efforts to swing the pendulum back and close Rikers had begun — first in a pitch to sell it to the state, and then, 20 years later, via an effort to slowly transition back to borough facilities that was killed by skepticism, a lack of an articulated reform vision, and community opposition. 

I watched something remarkable happen at the Mayor’s Office starting in 2017. Mayor Bill de Blasio transitioned from calling the closure of Rikers Island a “noble” but unrealistic idea to joining with the City Council on a 10-year plan to shutter the jails altogether. That plan sought to shrink the footprint of the system to less than 50% of its existing size, to spend billions on decent facilities off of the island and, ultimately, to invest over $400 million into neighborhoods. Many of the key components derived from work done in the Mayor’s Office as well as in a commission created by the City Council to examine the problems in the jails. Beyond a commitment to just shuffle the buildings, the plan was posited as an end to mass incarceration in New York City altogether. 

This attempt at transformation was larger in scale than anything that had come before. How did this happen? A significant amount of credit, of course, begins with the effectiveness of the grassroots movement that spearheaded it, led by a membership base of formerly incarcerated individuals that did everything from mobilize thousands in a march across the Rikers bridge, to bird-dog the mayor at both his Park Slope gym and fundraising events in Florida. 

That movement’s impact worked in concert with a City Council-appointed commission, chaired by a former chief judge and comprising civic and philanthropic leaders, that injected the vision of closing Rikers with an additional layer of credibility, along with a 150 page plan. (Notably, at least one of its members, Herb Sturz, had worked in City government pushing comparable plans that had failed years earlier). 

The commission came at a moment when the electoral and grassroots movements had moved criminal justice reform from being either a political liability or, at best, marginal, to being a core component of the progressive agenda in New York City. This, in turn, delivered a class of City councilmembers who, bucking NIMBY politics of the past, were willing to accept a jail in their backyard. At the same time, the New York City media was shining a continuous spotlight on the ills of Rikers, running literally hundreds of stories about conditions in the facility, the calls to close it and individual tragedies like that of Kalief Browder. 

I knew the writing was on the wall when the mayor couldn’t host a meeting of his own Clergy Advisory Council without getting pressed on what he would do about the closure of Rikers. De Blasio decided not only to make closing Rikers Island a centerpiece of his second-term agenda, but to commit to a smaller jail population as a piece of it, as well as $400 million in community investments to accompany the final land-use vote, including everything from expanded housing and restorative justice to improvements in South Bronx schools, New York City Housing Authority facilities and Chinatown parks. 

It is not unusual for a mayor to incentivize Council support for a land-use deal that might be controversial — that’s the playbook of how things get built in New York. But to get four councilmembers to join together in a single land-use action (in the words of one Council staffer at the time, “to hold hands together and jump”) required more than just the financial sweetening of a multimillion dollar pot of “community agreements.” It was only overwhelming external pressure that could make a plan like this happen. 

Yet despite the unprecedented nature of this moment, the headline in The New York Times the day after the historic City Council vote put it best: “N.Y.C. Votes to Close Rikers. Now Comes the Hard Part.” And that’s where the City finds itself now. 

Unsurprising to those who have done public construction projects in New York, the new facilities are both years behind schedule and billions over budget — standard bureaucratic challenges of capital projects that have been compounded by the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, its related supply chain problems, as well as inflation overall. After plunging to historical lows in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the jail population is now close to two thousand people higher than the capacity of the planned borough facilities, partially driven by case-processing times that far exceed national averages and a population of people with mental illness that continue to churn through the revolving cycle of homelessness and incarceration. 

The post-COVID-19 shift in the public discourse on public safety hasn’t helped, creating a different pressure on judges and district attorneys as they make decisions on diversion. And, critically, the conditions inside remain grim. Staff morale remains low, and, most tragically, at least 31 people have died while in custody in Rikers Island and other City jails since 2022. 

While the external forces were enough to move the tectonic plates of bureaucracy, the realities of government implementation — particularly through economic shifts, transitions in mayoral administrations and unexpected factors like a global pandemic — has returned the bureaucracy to its more standard glacial place. Skeptics of the plan to close Rikers had long asked the very fair question of whether meaningful change in prisons and jails in the United States could ever occur. Was actual, not just performative, reform possible? Could the closure of Rikers really happen and, if it did, could it go beyond a paint job and new buildings? 

But there is a solution to inertia and the recalcitrance of bureaucracies to change, and it lies in the same forces that produced the first tectonic shifts to begin with. It will always be as much about the external forces that create the conditions for change and move politics as about the internal leadership of City Hall and the Department of Correction in determining whether transformation takes hold. (Although, of course, good leadership of both is essential.) 

When we crafted the Close Rikers plan at the Mayor’s Office in 2019, we had a vision that transcended bricks and mortar. That vision included investment in interventions such as diversion, community mental health programs and supportive housing to further drive down the number of people in jail — as well as working with the courts, defenders and district attorneys to speed up case processing times. 

It included reimagining the Department of Correction itself, inspired (in part) by European models, partnering with staff in ground-up reform, prioritizing intensive training and treating health care and community reintegration as equally central to corrections as security officers. That vision saw belief in the possibility of reform not as a denial of how embedded racial inequality is in the history of the United States and its justice and penal systems, but as an essential component of facing those historical inequalities head on.

Change of this kind is never inevitable. When left to its own devices, politics — and government — tends to revert to its most incremental and cautious strategies. That leaves us, in 2024, asking a set of fundamental questions about this latest reform effort of the City’s jails. Will Rikers Island ever close? And if it does, will what follows look any different? 

The answer to those questions rests on the leadership of our elected officials and their ability to implement change and make reform stick, even when it’s hard. But it also rests most fundamentally on what happens outside of the halls of bureaucracy, and on the external forces that shape the politics of what is possible every day. Despite the challenge of sustaining organizing energy over years and recent ideological divisions, the number of organizations signing onto the Close Rikers coalition is still growing. Two hundred and thirty people called on the City Council to support closing Rikers in budget testimony this year alone. The Rikers Commission, reappointed under the new Council speaker, is back at work with an expanded membership. 

While the history of failed reforms in New York City jails offers plenty of reasons for cynicism, the possibility of the pressures outside of government also gives us reason for hope. And that, finally, could mean not just the closure of Rikers Island, but a willingness to build a new system with commitment to change beyond just the construction of new buildings. Let’s all hope that we finally get there, for the benefit of those who are incarcerated in the City’s jail system, for those who work in these facilities every day and for New Yorkers who want safety, justice and real change in their communities, once and for all.