Council calls on mayor to reverse Queens jail expansion – Queens Daily Eagle

By Jacob Kaye

A group of more than a dozen city council members this week called on the Adams administration to reverse its decision to increase the number of beds in the yet-to-be-built prison in Queens.

Led by Councilwoman Sandy Nurse, chair of the council’s criminal justice committee, 15 female council members demanded in a letter to Mayor Eric Adams that his administration “expand the plans to increase the number of beds for women and gender-expansive people in the proposal.” expand, would cancel” prison in Queens, which will one day be located in Kew Gardens.

The Kew Gardens facility is one of four city jails in the five boroughs that will replace Rikers Island, which the city is currently required by law to close by 2027. The future of the closure plan and the plan to build the jail The borough facilities have been questioned by the mayor, who says the city’s prison population has grown too large to fit the current plan. Adams and the City Council last fall jointly ordered the reform of the commission called in half a decade ago to draft the Rikers closure plan to potentially chart a new path toward closing the troubled prison complex.

Each of the county’s jail facilities was originally planned to house 886 inmates, with a total of 3,300 beds. But as Rikers’ population under Adams has steadily increased to more than 6,200 inmates over the past two years, the mayor claims more space will be needed to house the city’s inmates.

His government recently announced that each of the borough’s prison facilities will see population growth, including the Kew Gardens facility, which will become the centralized facility for women in custody.

The Queens prison was originally planned to have 125 beds for women and gender-expansive inmates – the prison will now be built with a capacity of 450 people.

But the council members, including Queens Council members Tiffany Cabán, Nantasha Williams, Julie Won and Jennifer Gutierrez, said in their letter that expanding the women’s facility is not only unnecessary but dangerous.

“It is urgent that we prioritize reducing the number of women now in custody and returning to the originally planned 126 beds at Kew Gardens,” councilors said in their letter.

“We have the tools to reduce our prison population and doing so is a moral and practical imperative as we chart a course for the city’s prisons,” she added. “There is no reasonable justification – practical, fiscal or humanitarian – for the city to more than triple its planned incarceration of women and gender expansive people.”

According to lawmakers, women are often “wrongfully” arrested and detained, including in cases where they try to defend themselves against intimate partner violence. Nearly half of all female inmates are survivors of domestic or sexual violence, council members said.

They also claimed that women and gender-expansive people are at particular risk of harm in the already dangerous prison, where more than 20 people have died in the past two years.

Last fall, more than 700 allegations of sexual assault against women in the city’s jails were made through the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that allowed victims of sexual assault to file lawsuits against their alleged abuser.

According to an analysis published by Gothamist, approximately 59 percent of all lawsuits filed against the Adult Survivors Act named the Department of Correction as a defendant.

According to the DOC, the agency has attempted to implement a number of changes in an effort to better track and respond to claims of sexual assault against both inmates and correctional officers.

The City Council is expected to hold a hearing in the coming weeks on how the agency responds to claims of rape and other forms of sexual violence.

In a statement to the Eagle, a City Hall spokesperson defended the city’s expansion of the women’s facility at Kew Gardens.

“With the city’s current jail population roughly twice the capacity of the system under the city’s jail plan, it is painfully clear that the plan approved under the last administration leaves serious questions about the city’s ability to keep New Yorkers safe keep,” the spokesperson said.

“The revised number of beds in each of the four facilities fairly reflects the realities of the criminal justice system and public safety in our city, including maintaining critical services for those in custody,” the spokesperson added. “This is what we must do to protect public safety, provide humane conditions for those in custody and close the jails on Rikers Island – there is simply no other path forward.”

But advocates and lawmakers say the Adams administration has made little effort to reduce the number of people incarcerated in New York City.

Under Adams, arrests have increased, as have criminal summonses. Programming at Rikers Island, aimed at reducing recidivism, has been cut back — only to be partially restored months later. Early release programs are stuck or on hold. In addition, the administration missed several deadlines set in the city’s plan to close Rikers.

The prison program in the boroughs has also suffered enormous delays. Only one of the facilities — the jail to be built in Brooklyn — has gone through the city’s contract system. Still, the Brooklyn location isn’t expected to be ready until 2029, two years after Rikers closes.

Advocates say that instead of expanding the number of beds, the city should work to provide treatment to those sent to Rikers, where about half the population has been diagnosed with a mental illness.

“We want to expand beds based on how you incarcerate people, rather than really identifying people’s needs and going from there,” the Rev. Sharon White-Harrigan, executive director of the Women’s Community, told me Justice Association. de Eagle during a recent interview. “The mayor himself said this: if we took those with mental health issues and people with addictions off the island, that would be half the population there.”

The Women’s Community Justice Association previously laid out a plan to get the number of women and gender-expansive people in the city below 100. In their letter, the council members called on the mayor to refer to that plan, which was developed jointly with Independent Rikers. Commission, the Center for Court Innovation and John Jay’s Data Collaborative for Justice.

“The steps were achievable and supported by decades of data, but so far we have seen no concerted effort to implement the report’s recommendations, only plans to grow the number of women in detention,” the statement said. council members.

About 360 people are currently being held at the women’s facility on Rikers Island known as the Rose M. Singer Center, or Rosie’s. The population there has grown by more than 50 percent since Adams took office. According to DOC data, Rikers’ overall population has grown by about 17 percent over the same period.