With Rikers Island, Eric Adams has made a bad situation worse

The New York Daily News recently ran an exclusive story with the headline “NYC Mayor Adams exploring abandoning current plan to shut down Rikers Island.” This shouldn't come as a surprise. Since taking office, the mayor has worked to undermine the plan. The Adams administration has repeatedly bashed the proposal the City Council approved in 2019 to close the jail complex. Despite the mayor's insistence that he and his team “always follow the law,” they have failed to meet most of the plan's legal deadlines and benchmarks to close Rikers in 2027, as required by law.

- By GABRIEL SAYEGH

Worse yet, Adams has blown up the centerpiece of the closure plan: reducing the jail population, including the use of safe, proven alternatives to incarceration. For decades, New York City steadily reduced the number of people caged at Rikers while reducing crime rates, showing that less incarceration and a safer city went hand in hand. This progress was due to an array of city and state policy reforms, strong social service infrastructure, and robust community-based action. The plan from 2019 required building on that success to reduce the jail population further, to 3,300.

Instead of working to do that, however, Adams pursued a jail-first approach, locking up even more people in the deadly and chaotic system while cutting the budgets for the very programs that safely reduce jail populations.