By gabriel sayegh in Amsterdam News
May 29, 2025
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.
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.
The results were predictable: When Adams took office, about 5,400 people were in jail citywide
— predominantly Black, brown, and low-income New Yorkers, most of them held pretrial and
many with serious mental health concerns. Today, more than 7,400 people are incarcerated —
an increase of about 37%, according to the tracking tool from the Data Collaborative for Justice.
Since Adams became mayor, conditions in the jails have gone from bad to much, much worse
and nearly 40 people have died while in Department of Correction custody. Rikers holds the
grim distinction of being New York’s largest mental health institution.
A federal judge has held the city in contempt for its “blatant failure” to comply with court orders
related to safety and transparency at the jails and putting people in “unconstitutional danger.”
The judge is now considering appointing an independent federal receiver to take control at
Rikers. This is an extremely serious and rare intervention of last resort.
While the current City Council has taken some important actions related to Rikers, including
banning solitary confinement, it has not held the mayor accountable for closing the jails on time.
Instead, in October 2023, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams appointed a powerless commission
to “update and enhance” the closure plan. The commission chair, former state Chief Judge
Jonathan Lippman, tried to assure the public in interviews and in op-ed penned with Eric
Adams that the mayor was committed to closing Rikers, despite ample evidence to the contrary.
The commission finally released its latest report in March, confirming what’s long been evident:
Rikers must be closed, but the plan to do so by 2027 is no longer viable. The commission
outlined recommendations that, if implemented, could see Rikers close by 2031 or 2032, but
since taking office, the mayor has largely ignored the commission’s recommendations. Last
week, he made it clear that he’s not going to start acting on them now.
By failing to hold Mayor Adams accountable for closing Rikers by 2027, the City Council has let
him run out the clock, leaving it to the next council and possibly a new administration to pick up
the pieces.
Many families and communities affected by the horrors of Rikers — including Katal Center
members — saw this writing on the wall years ago. That’s why we’re one of several organizations
from across the state pushing for Albany to fix the watchdog agency charged with jail and prison
oversight in New York, an entity that holds broad powers to investigate and shut down
dangerous facilities.
It’s also why we’ve joined with more than 100 organizations calling on the federal court to
appoint an independent receiver at Rikers, to improve conditions and save lives until the jail
complex is closed.
Adams can foil a plan, but he cannot stop New Yorkers on the long march for justice. As Katal
member Ziyadah Amatulmatin said about shutting Rikers, “The people have spoken, and we will
not settle for less.”
Gabriel Sayegh is executive director of the Katal Center for Equity, Health, and Justice.