New York City has approved a plan to close the incarceration facilities on Rikers Island and replace them with four new borough-based jails. When first put forth in 2017, the plan was conditioned on a reduction of the city's total jail population over the next ten years to about 5,000 inmates by 2026. Unlike Rikers Island—which, at half the size of Central Park, is large enough to hold ten separate low-rise jail facilities, along with parking lots, maintenance areas, and space for outdoor basketball courts and running tracks—the new jails will be high-rise buildings in already-dense urban areas. But community opposition to the new jail-skyscrapers led to an announcement earlier this week that the proposed facilities would be markedly smaller than originally anticipated. A planned 45-story jail in Manhattan will top out at 29 stories, while an originally conceived 39-floor, 395-foot facility in Brooklyn will now rise only 295 feet.
The city has decided to reduce the size of these not-yet-constructed facilities, according to Mayor de Blasio and city council speaker Corey Johnson, because the “expected average daily jail population for 2026 is now 3,300, due to the expectation of fewer people incarcerated.” This sudden one-third drop from the earlier 5,000 estimate was not driven by a change in crime trends—indeed, some serious crimes are trending up—but by the demands of council members in whose districts the new jails would be sited. These council members have refused to approve the construction of larger jails. The city, then, is apparently letting political considerations dictate how large its new jails can be, and then tailoring prisoner-population estimates to fit those circumstances.
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