Council and mayor’s office clash over Rikers’ closure plan

Former Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, who leads a commission charged with mapping out a plan to close Rikers Island. Lippman told the City Council about the plan during a hearing on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. Photo by John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit

By Jacob Kaye

The mayor’s office and the City Council remained in a standoff over the closure of Rikers Island on Wednesday, unable to agree on how the city should chart a new path toward shutting the deadly jail complex.

Though both sides of City Hall agreed on a few aspects of the quagmire that has become the jail complex’s closure – most importantly, the fact that the legally-mandated 2027 closure deadline can’t be met – they largely appeared to have differing visions for how the city should adjust and move forward with shutting Rikers for good.

The disagreement came to a head Wednesday during a Council hearing on a recent report issued by the Independent Rikers Commission, which was re-convened by City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams in 2023 to craft a new blueprint to shut the jails where over 100 people have died in the past decade.

The commission, whose top members also testified before the Council on Wednesday, issued its long-anticipated report last month, finding that a lack of urgency and will from the city has torpedoed any chance the 2027 closure deadline will be met. Though commission members didn’t blame any one official for the failure to hit the deadline in their report or during the hearing on Wednesday, there was virtually only one city leader the commission declined to praise – Mayor Eric Adams.

Though lawmakers were more overt in their criticism of the mayor’s handling of the plan to close Rikers, former Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, who leads the commission, told the Council on Wednesday that they should reject the mayor’s efforts to legally alter the 2027 deadline until his office promises to make a more serious effort to reduce the jails’ population, speed up the construction of the four borough-based jails and change the culture of incarceration in New York City.

“The statutory deadline of August 2027 to close Rikers should not be legally extended,” Lippman said. “Only when the required commitment and action is demonstrated along the lines that we have laid out and recommended, at least in our opinion, should an extension be considered or granted.”

“Now is the time for strong leadership by all present and future office holders in this city to close Rikers as soon as humanly possible,” he added. “It is a stain on the soul of our city. It is an accelerator of human misery.”

Nonetheless representatives of the mayor’s office asked the Council to pass a new law pushing the deadline back on Wednesday.

“The Lippman commission report acknowledges what the administration has been saying for a long time – Rikers cannot close by 2027,” said Deanna Logan, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. “We are asking the Council to work with the administration to amend the law to provide a more obtainable timeline.”

The Council, however, appeared to give no indication that they were willing to change the law any time soon.

Instead, they introduced a series of bills on Wednesday that directly addressed recommendations made in the commission’s recent report. Among them was a bill that would create an “office of coordinator for Rikers Island Closure” with a full-time director charged with coordinating the city’s efforts to shut the jails and open the four borough-based jails, which are all currently two to five years behind schedule.

“During this administration, the Council has lacked a committed and willing partner in City Hall to take the necessary actions to close Rikers and improve safety in our city’s jails to make the people detained, staff, and all New Yorkers safer,” City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, who is running for mayor, said in a statement.

“Following the Independent Rikers Commission’s release of its Blueprint to Close Rikers laying out the clear path forward to transition to a borough-based jail system, the Council is committed to advancing legislation, securing budgetary commitments, and advocating that the mayor’s office join us in taking actions that fulfill our responsibilities towards these shared goals,” she added. “As we have consistently stated, success requires partnership and close collaboration among all stakeholders, and the mayoral administration must be willing to take concrete steps to implement this blueprint.”

Adams has given little indication that he’s willing to follow the new blueprint to shut Rikers after largely ignoring the original plan, which was crafted under his predecessor, former Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Days after the commission issued its report earlier this year, the mayor said he was tasking his first deputy mayor, Randy Mastro, with looking into the building of a jail facility solely dedicated to housing detainees with a mental health diagnosis – currently, around half of Rikers’ detainees have a diagnosed mental illness.

The mayor’s proposal, which he floated multiple times prior to his March announcement, appeared to be in direct conflict with the recommendations to close Rikers from the commission, whose appointment was supported by the mayor in 2023.

The mayor has yet to provide any details about his proposal, including whether or not it would replace one of the four borough-based jails or be built in addition to the new lock-ups. He also hasn’t said how many people such a facility could accommodate, when it could be built or how its population would be determined. He also didn’t put a price tag on the project, which may only add to the nearly $16 billion bill racked up by the four new jails which were originally projected to cost a little over $8 billion.

The mayor’s proposal was not mentioned during Wednesday’s four-and-a-half-hour hearing.

Five Rikers detainees have died this year, matching the death toll from all of 2024.