Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s push to mindlessly free perps held at Rikers is a carbon copy of the de Blasio-era drive that immediately sent crime rates soaring; New Yorkers have zero reason to expect a different result.
The mayor means to shrink the jail population in the name of making the “replace Rikers” plan more feasible, which is ridiculous since his own Correction commissioner, Stanley Richards, just told the City Council, “The first borough-based jail facility is not expected to reach substantial completion until 2029.”
And the folks who’d get sprung are not the low-level offenders that the “criminal-justice reform” crew always pretends.
As veteran Queens prosecutor Jim Quinn notes in The Post, 95% of those now jailed at Rikers awaiting trial face felony charges, mostly for murder or another violent offense.
And the no-bail law doesn’t allow the jailing of those facing “non-violent” charges (car theft, commercial burglary, grand larceny, etc.) except for aggravating circumstances, such as reoffending while on probation or parole, harming someone while released pending trial on other charges, etc.
The last few years should have taught the whole city that a relatively few recidivists are responsible for nearly all major crime; keeping repeat offenders off the streets is vital to public safety.
Mamdani is looking to repeat the idiocy of 2019-’20, when state “reforms” let 2,000 perps out of Rikers prematurely, then Mayor Bill de Blasio released another 2,000 in the name of reducing COVID spread (though he too was looking to make “replace Rikers” look do-able).
Cue the violent crime spike of 2020-’21, which the city still hasn’t completely reversed.
The “reform” crowd also already ensured that those held at Rikers are the “worst of the worse” — individuals so dangerous and malevolent that even the city’s “cut ’em loose” judges see the need to jail them.
Yet Mamdani has made Richards the first ex-offender to head the city’s jail system; he says he’s working to “responsibly” reduce the number of people in custody by expanding supervised release, work release and alternatives to incarceration: Watch out.
They’d do far better working to improve conditions at Rikers: Someone should, since federal Judge Laura Swain, who’s supposed to enforce the decrees “mandating” improvement, just gave her handpicked “remediation manager” up to seven years to get it done.
Why, in the decade-plus since the federal consent decree began, haven’t the “reformers” made compliance their priority?
It makes you wonder if they’re truly concerned about suffering inside the city’s jails, or just mindlessly determined to get dangerous recidivists back on the streets because crime and chaos is what their vision of “justice” is really all about.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
