With Rikers Island, Eric Adams Has Made a Bad Situation Worse
by gabriel sayegh
May 6, 2025
Last week, the New York Daily News 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. And despite insisting 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 also 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.
But instead of working to do that, 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.
Credits: NYC.gov
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 percent according to the illuminating 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 Mayor Adams 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’s 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 outlines 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 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 have 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 impacted by the horrors of Rikers – including Katal Center members – saw this writing on the wall years ago. That’s why we’re one of nearly 100 groups 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.
And it’s 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 the executive director of the Katal Center for Equity, Health, and Justice.