Reaching a new ‘milestone’ in Mamdani’s close-Rikers plan is no reason to cheer

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is bragging that efforts to shut down the Rikers Island jail complex just reached another “milestone.”

Forgive us for not popping any champagne corks: Alas, the mayor still has no plan for where all the inmates will go when it does close.

Last week, Mamdani announced the transfer of three unused Rikers buildings, including a shuttered infirmary, from the Department of Correction to the Department of Citywide Administrative Services.

This “milestone,” he boasted, “brings us closer to ending” Rikers’ operation, though he conceded the shutdown plan won’t meet its 2027 deadline.

The mayor knows state law prevents jails from closing without a fully functional replacement, and the four new facilities being built won’t all be ready before at least 2032. 

For example, the planned Boerum Hill Brooklyn jail — a 15-story behemoth has been plagued by safety concerns and construction problems — isn’t slated to be completed until spring 2029.

The Bronx and Queens facilities are scheduled to open in 2031, while the $3.8 million Chinatown jail has a 2032 completion date.

Yet when finished, these facilities won’t have nearly enough space to accommodate even the current inmate population, let alone any additional inmates that would need to be housed should crime spike.

Last month, the average daily population of the Rikers Island jail complex was close to 6,600 people.

Yet Mamdani remains committed to building pricey, undersized jails with just 4,160 beds — and in neighborhoods that deeply oppose them.

The mayor is right, of course, that Rikers has been a disaster, but that’s mostly due to an inept bureaucracy, incompetent leadership and government’s failure to invest in infrastructure maintenance.

Shutting down Rikers and opening four smaller jails does little except multiply the pervasive culture of dysfunction, mismanagement and violence infecting the jail system where inmate deaths from fentanyl overdoses and suicide occur with regularity.

Mamdani may be figuring that soft-on-crime policies will lead to fewer inmates who need beds. But that also means more criminals out on the streets jeopardizing public safety.

Which is why every “milestone” reached in the close-Rikers plan is not a cause for celebration but additional fear.