Here Is NYC’s Draft Plan To Build Four Jails And Shut Down Rikers Island

Without much fanfare, on Wednesday the de Blasio administration released its draft plan to build four borough-based jails as part of its initiative to close the violence-plagued facilities on Rikers Island over the next decade.

Each of the facilities in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan would be built to hold around 1,500 detainees, which reflects the need, first outlined in the Lippmann Commission report from last year, for the City to reduce its total jails population to around 5,000 people for the plan to succeed. The site in the Bronx may contain 234 housing units, some of them affordable. 

There are concerns about reaching that number.

Stanley Richards, the executive vice president of the Fortune Society, who helped lay out the administration’s plan to reporters at a briefing on Wednesday, said he understood those concerns, “but we can’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”

“We have enough momentum right now that we need to be moving, that 5,000 figure is non-negotiable. And at some point it will require the state to come to the table, it will require the mayor to continue to move, and he’s doing it,” Richards said.