Mamdani Set To Release Blueprint For Rikers Island Closure

NEW YORK — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is set to release a much-anticipated proposal to close Rikers Island that will kick off a new round of negotiations over how to wind down the beleaguered jail facility.

The planning report, which could come out as soon as next week, is expected to contain a suite of strategies aimed at reducing the city’s detainee population, according to three people familiar with the blueprint, who were granted anonymity to discuss the pending announcement. One of those people said the city will propose extending the deadline for closing Rikers Island and transitioning to four borough-based jails to 2032.

As it now stands, the legally mandated deadline to close Rikers Island is August 2027.

The mayor’s office did not comment on the pending announcement, but a spokesperson doubled down on Mamdani’s commitment to ultimately shuttering the facility.

“As the mayor has said, our administration is fully committed to closing Rikers Island and transitioning to a borough-based jail system that is safer and more humane for both people in custody and staff who work in the jails,” spokesperson Sam Raskin said in a statement. “We will have more to share soon.”

The Mamdani administration cannot unilaterally decree a new legal closure date. That power rests with the City Council, which will be required to pass a new law extending the deadline. And Council lawmakers have made clear they will do so only in exchange for serious commitments from the administration on funding programs and attempting to shrink the amount of time detainees spend in jail awaiting trial.

The administration's announcement, planned for next week, appears designed to kick off those talks.

While the specific details were still unclear, the plan is expected to contain strategies like funding diversion programs that keep people out of jail, beefing up the budget for public defenders to make sure those accused of crimes can get through the court system as quickly as possible, additional medical and mental health care and increasing services for those coming off of Rikers Island.

The administration is also likely to highlight other bottlenecks in the court system, even if they are not directly under city officials’ control.

By law, Rikers Island is supposed to be closed within less than a year's time. The city is nowhere close to making that happen.

Construction on new jails in every borough except Staten Island is years behind schedule: A facility in Brooklyn is scheduled for completion in 2029, the first of the four. The new jail in Manhattan will be last, with an expected completion date of 2032.

And the current Rikers population exceeds capacity at the planned facilities by thousands of detainees, most of whom are awaiting trial for periods that have increased dramatically in recent years.

Reducing that population is a crucial step toward finally shuttering the jail and opening the new facilities.

For years, the Council and the administration of former Mayor Eric Adams were unable to make any serious headway. To goose things along, the Council last year passed a bill sponsored by Council Member Sandy Nurse that required the administration to create an office that would coordinate the transition to borough-based jails. In April, Mamdani named Dana Kaplan, an alum of former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, as the city’s Close Rikers Czar.

As part of that role, Kaplan chairs an interagency working group technically responsible for releasing the strategic plan, which, per the Council’s law, was supposed to be published in May of this year.

The plan to close the notoriously violent penal facility was first passed in 2019. Things have not gone well since. In addition to blown construction deadlines and the population mismatch, a federal monitor has observed a troubling number of detainee deaths and assaults against correction officers — a trend that advocates hope the new facilities will help reverse.