NEW YORK (1010 WINS/AP) -- It's the end of an era.
New York City Council voted Thursday afternoon 36-13 to shut down Rikers Island by 2026 and replace the notorious complex with four smaller jails located closer to the city's main courthouses in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens.
City Council Speaker Corey Johnson called Rikers Island "a symbol of brutality and inhumanity.'' He said the city must move away from "the failed policies of mass incarceration.''
Protestors gathered at City Hall on Thursday to rally against the proposed restructuring of the New York City jail system.
"It's not clear how they're going to get these numbers and it's politically driven,'' Barron said. "It's a big risk because we've already taken all the nonviolent people out of Rikers.''Barron blames the effort to empty the city's jails for the beating deaths of four homeless men in Manhattan's Chinatown this month.Randy Santos, the man charged with attacking the men as they slept, had been recently freed from jail after several arrests for previous, less serious attacks on other people."What is clear is that progressive social policies gave Santos the freedom to feed his addictions and nurture his insanity _ until he murdered four innocent people,'' Barron wrote in the institute's City Journal .Inmates would be moved to four new or expanded jails in each city borough except Staten Island under the proposal, making it easier for the inmates to receive visits from lawyers and family members who will no longer have to travel to an island.The plan met some resistance from residents of neighborhoods surrounding the jail sites. City Council leaders announced Tuesday they would decrease the heights of the planned jails to win support. A prison skyscraper planned for lower Manhattan was cut from 45 to 29 stories and a proposed Brooklyn jail went from 39 to 29 stories. City Council member Margaret Chin, a Democrat who represents lower Manhattan, said the shorter jail tower planned for her district ``will no longer be out of scale with the neighborhood.''But others say they don't want any new jails at all. Marlene Nava Ramos, a member of the advocacy group No New Jails NYC, said ``the idea is to begin actually decarcerating New York City instead of building new jails.''Martin Horn, who headed the city Department of Correction from 2003 to 2009 under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, said reducing the jail population to 3,300 would be ``a historic accomplishment'' but he questioned the 2026 deadline for completing the new jails."My experience is that city construction projects of this magnitude take far longer,'' said Horn, who now teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.Rikers Island has housed jail inmates since the 1930s and has long been known for brutality. The jail complex saw hundreds of stabbings each year during the 1980s and early 1990s.More recently, a 2014 Associated Press investigation detailed dozens of inmate deaths including that of a homeless ex-Marine who essentially baked to death in a hot cell."I know what damage Rikers does to people. Rikers is not a fit place for human beings,'' said JoAnne Page, president of the Fortune Society, a nonprofit organization that provides support to formerly incarcerated people."We are moving in the right direction after so many years of moving in the wrong way,'' she said.
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