The number of inmates at Rikers Island is expected to surge before the problem-plagued lockup can be closed by 2027, officials said Friday.
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s final plan to close Rikers will ultimately slash the population by about half to 5,000 so they can be moved to smaller neighborhood facilities in the Bronx, Queens, Manhattan and Brooklyn.
All sites but the site in the Bronx — which is a former NYPD tow lot at East 141st Street — are jails that are being re-built.
“When those buildings need to close for demolition inmates from those locations would need to be relocated to existing department facilities on Rikers Island,” said Brenda Cooke, the Department of Correction chief of staff, at a City Hall press conference.
Cooke also announced that female inmates will all be housed together in the Queens jail at the Family Justice Center at 126-02 82nd St., even though a major goal in the Rikers shutdown is to move inmates closer to their families and courts.
“So I think there were competing concerns here,” said Elizabeth Glazer, director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. She said that the services that would be available to women grouped in one place “outweighed having them in each individual borough.”
The public approval process for the new plan is expected to start next week and last about seven months. Construction on the four new jails is scheduled to begin in 2021 and end in 2027. The Manhattan jail will be located at 125 White St. and the Brooklyn facility will be at 275 Atlantic Ave. Both addresses are the current sites of the boroughs’ Detention Centers.
Officials would not give a cost projection for the new facilities but a mayoral spokeswoman said after the press conference that it should not be higher than $10 billion to $12 billion.