Rikers Island Jail To Be Closed, Mayor Bill De Blasio Says

CITY HALL, NY — Rikers Island jail will be closed down, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday.

The mayor announced at a press conference that the city had committed to shutting the notorious facility.

De Blasio said the city would phase out its use over the next 10 years, with the goal of completely closing it within the decade.

De Blasio made the announcement with NYC Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who has long advocated for the jail to close.

"For too long, Rikers Island has stood as a symbol of injustice in our city and a stain on our criminal justice system," Mark-Viverito said at Friday's press conference.

Civil rights activists have said the jail was beyond reform for years, demanding that the facility be shuttered instead.

De Blasio’s surprise announcement on Friday marks an about-turn for the mayor. He had previously insisted that the detention center could be reformed and that replacing it with alternatives would be too costly.

"I think it was a noble idea from the beginning, but I didn't see how it was attainable under the conditions we were facing," de Blasio explained of his change of mind on Friday.

"We had to do a lot of work to figure out the path that would actually achieve this goal."

The mayor's commitment to shuttering the facility comes in advance of an independent report that will also reportedly recommend that the jail is beyond reform. The report, which is scheduled to be released on Sunday, was written by an independent commission that the city council convened to study the detention center last year.

De Blasio sketched out the bare-bones timeline for the jail's shutdown on Friday, insisting that the average jail population must dip to 5,000 before the facility can be shut down and should be at about 7,000 within five years. The jail population throughout the city — on Rikers and in other detention centers — was about 9,300 in March.

"There is no doubt that the road to Rikers Island’s closure will be long and arduous," de Blasio said in a statement.

The mayor admitted on Friday that the plan was a "very aggressive goal" and that it could take longer than 10 years to shut down the facility.

Both De Blasio and Mark-Viverito spoke on Friday about the death of Kalief Browder, a Bronx teenager who was wrongly imprisoned in the jail for three years without a trial.

Browder was accused of stealing a backpack and maintained his innocence until he was released from jail. Browder spent about two of those three years in solitary confinement.

He killed himself about two years after he was released.

"I think the death of Kalief Browder was a wake-up call to this city," de Blasio said Friday.

The teenager's imprisonment and subsequent suicide became a focal point for criminal justice reformers after Browder's story was revealed in a New Yorker magazine piece.

De Blasio refrained by outlining specific alternatives to the Rikers facility upon its eventual closure, only saying the city would need to build "a few" new facilities but declining to speculate about where the city would build those.

This story has been updated throughout with additional information.

Lead image via Shutterstock.