With every contract City Hall signs for new jails to replace Rikers, the completion date gets further and further away.
Of course, the hare-brained “close Rikers” scheme never made sense, and the sooner the politicians see sense and shift to rebuilding Rikers, the better.
The latest sign: a $3.8 billion deal that extends the completion date for the Chinatown jail to 2032.
This, after the latest contracts for buildings in Queens and The Bronx pushed construction timelines back to 2031; the complete date for a Brooklyn jail is now 2029.
And these projects almost never actually finish remotely on time; at best, expect them to finish years late.
Yet the “plan “vision” to close Rikers and build a smaller jail in each of four boroughs, which passed in 2019, envisioned shutting the island complex by 2027, just two years from now.
So: Five years in, the plan is five years behind; wonder where it’ll be in another five.
Fact is, no community wants a jail in its neighborhood, and with good reason: Neighborhoods are no place for jails.
And the de Blasio-era plan siting them there had huge other problems, too.
Above all else, the four new jails would be able to hold only about 4,000 inmates — a far cry from Rikers’ 15,000.
In 1990, the inmate population soared to 21,000.
As recently as 2017 it was 9,400, though with soft-on-crime politicians, judges and prosecutors handing out get-out-of-jail free cards, particularly during COVID, it now stands at about 6,000.
Yet failing to jail perps has already sent crime soaring (major felonies were up 30% last year over 2019).
More thugs need to be behind bars — not fewer of them.
Trouble is, neighborhoods are already fuming over the planned (but too small!) the new lockups; any attempt to make them bigger will have folks out in the streets with pitchforks (or leaving Gotham altogether).
The wild price tag — originally a whopping $8.7 billion price tag, but now almost twice that — is another problem.
The city (like the state) already faces monster budget gaps in coming years; it doesn’t need to incur more debt for on a crazy project no one (save delusional progressives) wants.
Yes, Rikers needs work. But that doesn’t mean it should be closed and replaced with too-small, inappropriate facilities in neighborhoods that understandably oppose them — and at an astronomical cost.
Fixing Rikers, rather than replacing it, has always made far more sense.
Mayor Eric Adams’ spokesperson, Liz Garcia, says City Hall “remains committed” to closing Rikers but acknowledged that doing so by the 2027 deadline is unlikely.
Again, it’s not remotely possible: No replacements will be online then.
When are the progs going to face reality, admit the whole project is a farce and focus on simply fixing the jail complex we have?
Meanwhile, New Yorkers should keep their fingers crossed that the deadlines for the new jails keep slipping — forever.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
