Mayor Adams’ office said Tuesday that his team has looked into the possibility of building a mental health facility instead of a jail on the Manhattan site selected to become one of the four borough-based lockups meant to replace Rikers Island.
Liz Garcia, a spokeswoman for Adams, confirmed the talks about the Manhattan location after the mayor told reporters in a press conference that the Brooklyn borough-based jail site would be an “excellent place” to build a mental health facility instead of a detention complex. Garcia said Adams meant to refer to the Manhattan borough-based jail site in Chinatown.
The revelation from Adams’ office comes after the Daily News first reported Friday that his administration has been exploring turning the Brooklyn location into a mental health facility and building regular housing instead of jails on the sites of the other three proposed lockups in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx.
On Friday, Garcia said Adams’ administration is continuing to build borough-based jails, but didn’t deny conversations have taken place internally about potentially constructing housing instead on some of the sites. Garcia did say Friday that Adams’ team has not looked at turning the Brooklyn borough jail site into a mental health complex.
But on Tuesday, Garcia said, in fact, that could be getting looked at, too, as a potential site for a mental health complex.
“Everything is on the table,” she said.
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Todd Maisel/New York Daily News An aerial view of the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City. (Todd Maisel / New York Daily News)
The proposed Manhattan borough-based jail has drawn intense pushback from local elected officials and community advocates who say it’d be a bad fit for the neighborhood. It’s unclear if an effort to turn the site into a mental health facility instead would quell those concerns.
Adams has for months mused about making one of the borough-based jails a mental health facility without specifying which site he believes would be best suited. By some estimates, about half those housed on Rikers are suffering from some sort of psychiatric disability.
The behind-the-scenes efforts to rethink the plan comes depsite the city already being well behind schedule on the legally mandated plan to shutter Rikers and replace it with borough-based jails by 2027. Under contracts signed for all four borough-based jails, none of them are slated to be completed for opening by then, when Rikers by law must be closed.
Adams reiterated Tuesday that he doesn’t believe the jail complex can shutter on time.
“I think it’s pie in the sky to close in 2027,” he said, adding the law to close Rikers “was flawed from the beginning.”
Amid the debate over the plan, it remains unclear what might happen to the detainees currently housed on the island. Even were the project to be completed on time, the census on Rikers far exceeds the planned capacity.
The inmate population on Rikers has swelled under Adams, with more than 7,000 currently held there, most of them awaiting trial. That’s far more inmates than could be accommodated in the borough-based jails, which are designed to have roughly 4,100 beds, making the possibility Rikers will have stay open past 2027 even more likely.
Independent Rikers Commission executive director Zachary Katznelson noted his group has recommended building 500 new forensic psychiatric beds “in a separate facility — in addition to the four safer, modern jails near the courthouses, not instead of one.”
“That’s how we can best support crime victims, incarcerated people, and correctional staff,” Katznelson said.
Any modification Adams would seek to the borough-based jails plan could face a litany of hurdles. The law states Rikers, which has for decades been plagued by violence and dangerous conditions, must close by August 2027 and be replaced with the four borough jails.
Adopted in 2019, the law would need to be modified by the City Council in order for any potential tweaks to become a reality, and Council Democrats have made clear they’re not looking to change the underlying plan. If Adams went ahead with a modification to the plan without Council approval, he’d likley face lawsuits.
Adams hasn’t formally introduced a proposal to the Council for how to change the Close Rikers plan.
With Josie Stratman and Graham Rayman
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