Rebuilding Rikers is the only sane anti-crime – Latest News
Andrew Cuomo has lastly come out for the only sane place on the troubled Rikers Island jail complicated: Rebuild it, don’t exchange it with smaller, more expensive borough ones.
Cuomo had beforehand blasted the jail complicated as a “hell hole” that needed to be closed; it appears that evidently taking a look at the subject as would-be subsequent mayor has introduced him to the sane aspect of the road (becoming a member of GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa).
We can’t say the similar about the front-runner, although even Zohran Mamdani has moved a bit towards actuality: In pursuit of his call to “abolish jails,” he had wished to close Rikers and never construct any replacements in any respect; now he (reluctantly) embraces the “replacement” pipe dream . . . er, plan.
NYC mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo holds a press convention close to his Manhattan house on the East Side to speak about his political opponent, Zohran Mamdani. Matthew McDermott
It’s a lot like his fallback on defunding the NYPD: Just as his policing imaginative and prescient is nonetheless for fewer cops, doing much less crime-fighting, his jail imaginative and prescient is for new jails that may’t detain wherever close to as many people as now sit at Rikers.
That is, he’s down with the de Blasio-era law that requires the 15,000-bed Rikers complicated to shutter by 2027, although that plan assumed smaller jails in 4 boroughs can be completed first.
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Yet even the fanatically anti-Rikers Lippman Commission now admits Rikers can’t close on schedule, the 4 alternative jails received’t be constructed earlier than 2032.
And of course prices are working almost twice the unique $9 billion price tag, with most of the work nonetheless forward.
Per present official estimates, the Brooklyn jail is to complete in 2029, the Bronx and Queens ones in 2031, and the Manhattan (Chinatown) one in 2032.
But don’t wager the mortgage (and even your lunch money) on any of these deadlines standing up.
Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani introduced that he launched a marketing campaign’s financial savings calculator web site at Travers Park on October 6, 2025, in Queens, New York. Ron Adar / M10s / SplashNews.com
So, although the progressive-dominated City Council to date received’t even suppose of updating the law, Gotham has lots of time to reverse course, drop the borough-based jails and easily rebuild on Rikers Island.
That method, New York City can retain the detention capability it really wants, and never have to start out chopping perps free just because there’s nowhere to put them.
Yes, the Rikers jails need a lot of work, together with management and labor overhauls in addition to reconstruction.
The Rikers Island jail signal is seen on March 07, 2023, in New York City, New York. Getty Images
Yet fixing the “hellhole” requires realism, not “look at our lovely vision” fantasies.
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Regular New Yorkers pays the price if highly effective progressives keep up their denial of Rikers realities.
Count this as one more subject the place the complete metropolis will undergo if Mamdani and his crew of deranged socialist theorizers take over City Hall.
