Standing near the Chinatown site of a proposed 16-story new detention center, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday detailed his proposal to scrap a planned shutdown of the Rikers Island jail complex if he is elected mayor.
“My plan is to rebuild Rikers,” said Cuomo at the New York Chinese Community Center on Mott Street. “The island is fine. The island did nothing wrong.”
By law, Rikers must stop functioning as an incarceration site by 2027. Four borough jails with capacity for about more than 4,100 people are either under construction or soon scheduled to be near courthouses in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and The Bronx, under a long-in-the works project whose price tag has grown to $16 billion while suffering extensive delays.
The close-Rikers plan grew out of an independent commission convened by the City Council and led by former state Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, focused on bringing people in the criminal justice system closer to their home communities and relying more on alternatives to pretrial detention.
Since then, conditions have only gotten more dire: Twelve people have died in custody at Rikers Island so far this year, and a Manhattan federal judge presiding over a civil rights lawsuit settlement will soon decide on an outside overseer who will manage operations.
But on Wednesday, building on remarks he made last week at a Crain’s candidate forum, Cuomo presented an alternative plan for the island, with architectural renderings that show proposed new health facilities, sports fields, a learning center and greenery, in addition to holding cells — calling them “state of the art” and “humane.”
Addressing a key objective of reformers who advanced the borough-based jails, Cuomo promised direct express buses and ferries from each borough to Rikers Island to help make the remote island in the East River more accessible to families and attorneys.
Cuomo described the borough jails in an op-ed published Wednesday as “a $16 billion boondoggle that would drop massive towers in the middle of residential neighborhoods, harm small businesses and schools, divide communities, and still fail to deliver a safer, fairer system.”
Citing an original planned capacity of 3,300 people for the new borough jails, Cuomo noted that the Rikers jails currently house 7,000 — more than double that number. (The new construction projects are in fact slated to build 4,160 jail beds, in addition to capacity for 363 people detained in hospitals.)
Instead, he is proposing to repurpose the borough jails already in planning or — in the case of Brooklyn — under construction as affordable housing, part of his plan to approve 80,000 affordable housing units in his first year in office if elected.
Although the downtown Brooklyn jail is already under construction and the Queens facility has also broken ground, William Bialosky, the head of the architectural firm that produced the renderings for Cuomo, said repurposing those sites for housing and redeveloping Rikers would save a projected $3 billion.
Cuomo first declared his intent to scrap the borough-based jail plan if elected mayor in a May candidate survey for THE CITY’s Meet Your Mayor quiz.
Given a choice between proceeding with the planned Rikers shutdown and borough jails or pausing construction, Cuomo — as well as Curtis Sliwa, now the Republican nominee — chose “Pause planning for jails still in the design phase, work with the City Council to reinvest in Rikers facilities.”
Cuomo elaborated: “We need to face the facts that the new borough jails will not be completed in time to close Rikers by 2027. We need to stop massive budget overruns and develop an interim plan for the operation of Rikers while we do an overall assessment of what the right pathway forward should be.”
‘Intrusive and Unnecessary’
With 10 days to go until the start of early voting, Cuomo took jabs at Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, who bested him in the primary — and who before running for public office in 2020 had advocated not only for closing Rikers but also against the opening of any new detention centers, under the #NoNewJails banner.
Since then, as a member of the state Assembly representing Queens and as a candidate for mayor, Mamdani has reaffirmed his commitment to shutting down Rikers but now says he supports the construction of the new jails — if only as a matter of official duty.
“Part of closing Rikers Island is following through on the contractual obligations that the city has with the construction of these new jails,” Politico reported he said on Sunday. “That doesn’t preclude me from meeting with New Yorkers who have immense concerns about them, but it does ensure that the focus has to be on following that law.”
Cuomo fired back with old tweets from Mamdani that used the #NoNewJails hashtag to suggest that his rival could not be trusted — accusing Mamdani of flip-flopping and calling it “strange” that he is now committing to following a law that he’d opposed.
Some people attending the Chinatown event groaned when Cuomo contended Mamdani intends “to release the 7,000 people of Rikers” in 2027.
Chinatown resident Loreen Leong pulled Cuomo aside after the event and advised him to tone down his rhetoric lest he sound like a “stereotypical angry white man.”
She told THE CITY she believes his remarks about Mamdani on Wednesday were “an exaggeration” — adding that she nonetheless plans to vote for Cuomo.
Albert Hom, 70, said he liked what he saw in the renderings — but that as a retired architect himself, he needs to look at the details.
A new jail in the neighborhood, he said, “is just intrusive and unnecessary, to me.”
