In a historic decision this past October, the New York City Council voted 36-13 in favor of an $8.7 billion dollar plan that would close Rikers Island—a prison complex infamous for its history of violence and abuse—by 2026. In its place, the city will construct four new jails based in the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn. Council members voting in favor of the initiative declared it a triumph for criminal and racial justice reform; after the council’s vote, Mayor Bill de Blasio proclaimed that “the era of mass incarceration is over.”

According to proponents of the council’s plans, the new jails will be a model of “humane incarceration” They will not only be smaller and safer, but they will also provide inmates with job training, mental health counseling, and education services. The jails will also be closer to communities and court facilities, a move which the council claimed will address how Riker’s remote location isolated defendants from their legal representatives and caused delays in court hearings, keeping many incarcerated inmates in jail for longer as they awaited trial. In addition to the jails, the council committed $300 million to community investment which includes an expansion in public housing and healthcare initiatives.

While some, including de Blasio, heralded the plan as a step forward for criminal justice reform, others are not so sure about the mayor’s proclamation. In fact, some criminal justice reform advocates claim the plan is tantamount to a haphazard repair—and further entrenchment—of a system designed to be broken.

Rikers, located in the East River between Queens and the Bronx, has housed New York City's main jail complex for the past 90 years and consists of 9 actively operated jails. The island primarily houses houses people serving sentences of one year or less as they await trial or transfer to another facility. Rikers has a long and notorious history of inmate abuse. In 2014, the US Department of Justice issued a damning report describing the “deep-seated culture of violence” in the jails, including pervasive abuse of underage and mentally ill inmates and reliance on an “excessive and inappropriate” degree of solitary confinement. In the wake of the report, the Department of Correction entered a consent decree with the DOJ in 2015 that mandated the monitoring of inmates’ civil rights.

Also in 2015, Kalief Browder, who was held at Rikers for three years awaiting trial for an alleged crime he was ultimately never convicted for, committed suicide after struggling to readjust to life in the wake of the abuse he faced while in jail, particularly the two years he spent in solitary confinement. In June 2019, Layleen Polanco Xtravaganza, an Afro-Latinx transgender woman, died in solitary confinment at Rikers after being held for two months on a $500 bail charge. Polanco's death sparked calls for Rikers' closure from transgender rights and criminal justice activists, who condemned the lack of transparency surrounding her death and the broader issues of a criminal justice system that disproportionately targets trans women of color.

Despite its overt flaws, New Yorkers pay dearly to support Rikers: According to a 2015 study from the Vera Institute of Justice, it costs taxpayers approximately $209,000 a year to detain just one person at Rikers Island; conversely, the city spends $23,000 a year—ten times less—per pupil in public schools.

Since the so-called “War on Drugs” and “War on Crime” in the 1980s and 90s, skyrocketing mandatory minimum sentences and increased “stop-and-frisk” policing have driven an unprecedented expansion in mass incarceration. The US, while holding just 5% of the world's population, accounts for 25% of the global prison population. In 2010, Michelle Alexander’s flashpoint book The New Jim Crow decisively chronicled how mass incarceration disproportionately targets black men and decimates communities of color, functioning as a contemporary system of racial hierarchy. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 1 in 3 black men can expect to go to prison in his lifetime, in contrast to 1 in 17 white men. At Rikers, national demographic trends in incarceration hold true: the majority of people held there are African-Americans and Latinos from low-income neighborhoods.

Such a dramatically expansive and discriminatory system has drawn activists to equally expansive, dramatic proposed solutions. No New Jails NYC (NNJ) is a prison abolitionist group founded in September 2018, shortly after de Blasio launched the initial land-use approval process for the construction of the borough-based jails. To them, the construction of the new jails is an expansion of the city’s carceral system that will do little to improve neighborhood safety. Instead, NNJ argues that no new jails should be built, and that the funds allocated for their construction should be diverted into social programming and community services.

Moreover, while the council’s vote advanced the passage of a zoning resolution that would prohibit incarceration on Rikers after December 31st, 2026, there has yet to be a formal legally binding confirmation from the mayor’s office that Rikers will close by that date, which is long after de Blasio will leave office. The absence of this confirmation has become another source of NNJ criticism: the plan opens the prospect of expanding jails without a definite guarantee that Rikers will close.

The campaign was successful in convincing City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, who represents parts of Queens, to vote against building the new jails. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents parts of Queens and the Bronx, has also endorsed NNJ’s position.

An important element of all proposed plans to close Rikers is the decarceration of thousands of New Yorkers. The initiative to close Rikers comes amidst record-low crime rates and a declining incarcerated population over the past decade. The current population of Rikers stands at about 7,000, down from its peak of almost 22,000 in 1991 during the height of the War on Drugs. In the next six years, the city aims to slash that figure by more than half with a target of 3,300, down from their initial goal of 5,000, due in part to pressure from grassroots activists. Each of the four planned borough facilities has the capacity for about 900 beds, making for a combined 3600 beds available.

In January 2020, New York State is set to outlaw cash bail for most people charged with misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, a move that will reduce the number of people being held in NYC jails simply because they cannot afford to post bail (as was the case with both Kalief Browder and Layleen Polanco.)

Both NNJ and #CLOSERikers, another prison abolition group, have both advocated for the maximum occupancy cap for NYC jails to be lowered further, to below 3,000—and eventually, to 0.

While criminal justice reform has become a popular issue in recent years, prison abolition has been less discussed in the political mainstream. Though prison abolition may sound extreme and heavy-handed, the theory is actually more nuanced. For abolitionist theorists like Professor Ruth Gilmore, who has been active in abolition movements for the past 30 years, abolition means more than just the closing of prisons and jails. In much of her work, Gilmore argues that the abolition process also involves shifting the focus of justice toward implementing vital systems of support that many vulnerable communities lack: access to quality housing, education, and healthcare. Abolitionists contend that prisons, while they are framed as instilling law, order, and peace in our society, don’t effectively prevent violence—murderers and rapists with the means to get off free will continue to do so. Meanwhile, a culture of violence thrives within many prisons, with Rikers as an infamous exemplar.

Instead of asking how society should deal with so-called “violent people,” abolitionists ask how we resolve injustice and get people the resources they need long before the hypothetical moment when they commit violent acts. For prison abolitionists, their work addresses crime not at its symptoms, but its source. And often, that source of crime is poverty.

In the place of our current punitive justice system, wherein people who break the law are incarcerated to “pay a debt to society,” prison abolition is a facet of restorative justice: an ideology that promotes rehabilitation of offenders through reconciliation with victims and the community to address the harm caused by violence.

Although reforms are often the first steps to broader abolition, abolitionist theory is distinct. In her 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete?, activist and professor Angela Y. Davis notes a central irony: just as many on the political left have embraced a stance against capital punishment, these same advocates rely on the assumption that life sentences without parole—which to many represent a protracted death--are the most rational alternative solution. Indeed, when our modern conception of “prison” was first implemented in 18th century England, prisons were a reform away from corporal punishment. Other types of reforms, like mandatory minimums, which were originally promoted as a preventative measure against arbitrary, racially discriminatory sentencing by judges, have only expanded the system. Prison was the reform, Davis argues, and subsequent reforms have only further entrenched and expanded the prison industrial complex—which has been antithetical to promoting justice. In that vein, NNJ argues that jails by definition do not increase public safety, no matter which structural reforms are implemented. A holding unit on Rikers that had been reformed specifically for trans prisoners still killed Layleen Polacio.

A replacement to prisons would constitute an array of societal transformations. In particular, a community-sourced Abolition Plan released by NNJ calls for the expansion of housing and shelter programs, extending more CUNY scholarships, and healthcare, particularly mental healthcare. Currently, Rikers is the largest provider of mental health care in New York City.

“Abolition is less about the absence of prisons and jails, and much more about the presence of everything we need in order to thrive and build a society that does not rely on our imprisonment and premature death,” NNJ wrote in the document. “Ultimately, the only way to “improve” conditions is to get all of our people free by freeing money from policing and corrections and radically investing it in things we need and want such as affordable housing, employment, and healthcare.”

#CLOSErikers, another prison abolitionist coalition founded in April 2016, has been a driving force in the grassroots campaign to close Rikers. They formally endorsed the council’s plan to construct the borough based-jails in place of Rikers, claiming it as a victory for people currently incarcerated in NYC and for laying the groundwork for more widespread decarceration.

Some members of the #CLOSErikers coalition have raised concerns over NNJ’s plan to close Rikers without building the new facilities due to the fact that that existing city jails, where the 3,000 people that will remain incarcerated after Rikers closes would be sent by default, face cultures of violence similar to that of Rikers. In particular, a detention center in lower Manhattan—colloquially known as “the Tombs”—also has a long history of violence and inmate abuse by correctional officers. While they state a commitment to eventually having an incarcerated population of “zero” in NYC, NNJ does not specifically call for the closure of the existing borough-based jails in its plan. By contrast, the council’s plan for the four new jail facilities states a commitment to replace existing borough-based jails in addition to Rikers, a move supported by #CLOSErikers.

In an email sent to supporters in late October, #CLOSErikers pressed that there was “much more” work to do in terms of securing community benefits programs, citing discrepancies between the billions spent on jail and law enforcement and the comparatively smaller amount—a full 30 times less—being put towards community based reforms. They also stated a commitment to continue to pressure the city to end the practice of solitary confinement and, further, to decriminialize sex work, a move that would further reduce the number of people incarcerated in the city.

“The approval of new buildings isn’t enough to address the culture of abuse and violence with City jails—we agree on this point with many who opposed this plan,” #CLOSErikers wrote in the email. “[W]e are just getting started in addressing the decades of disinvestment that have harmed communities of color...We know that the more than $7 billion dollars spent on law enforcement annually in this City can and must be redirected to the resources that actually make us safe by meeting people’s needs.”

As of now, it appears as though headway is being made in constructing the jails in anticipation of the gradual closure of Rikers. Still, the debates sparked by prison abolition activists to radically reduce NYC’s prison population press consideration of not simply how to close one infamous facility, but to address the roots of its corruption. It calls for implementation of social community support programs that proactively prevent violence, redress for policing practices that disproportionately affect low income people of color, ending practices of caging people because they cannot afford bail, and rethinking why we see the need to put people in cages at all. It may well call for the eradication of not just “the era of mass incarceration,” but the repressive nature of incarceration itself.

Prison Abolition and the Fight to Close Rikers