New York City spends $2.6 billion per year to operate its grossly dysfunctional jails. And we know exactly how we can pay for it. We look forward to seeing these recommendations included in the mayor’s first Executive Budget. We will be calling on the new administration to invest in the things that work – youth employment, career training, supportive and affordable housing, quality treatment, mentoring, and more. We will be sharing a blueprint to do it, developed by a commission packed with both lived experience and technical expertise, of which I’ve been a member. Mayor Adams has said that he wants to close the pipeline that feeds Rikers, and we could not agree more. This month, the commission on reinvestment in communities impacted by Rikers Island, established by Local Law 193, will issue its first set of recommendations. Luckily, we have so many examples of what does strengthen our communities and make them safer. Shouldn’t that show us that the criminal legal system didn’t address the root cause of their behaviors, and we need to do something different? Since then, the New York City jail population has been reduced by almost 75% and our city is much safer, but much of the same misguided thinking still drives our policy responses - for example, calls for more incarceration when people with prior convictions are arrested. This was the consequence of austerity guided mostly by a particular ideology and racism rather than fiscal necessity. In the early ‘90s, at the age of 16, I was sent to Rikers when the daily average incarcerated population reached over 21,000 and more than 100,000 people annually. By this time, all my older brothers were impacted by the criminal legal system. The criminalization and incarceration of people of color intensified in the ‘80s. Education, health, and social services were placed on the city’s budget chopping block, disproportionately impacting already neglected communities like Brownsville, East New York, and Bedford-Stuyvesant. In the 1970s, New York faced a fiscal crisis. Growing up in Brooklyn, I saw this firsthand. In addition to their individual challenges, they were all Black and brown men, growing up in a society that has starved our communities of resources and then punished us in our struggle to survive. Among them were people who struggled with bipolar disorder, addiction, schizophrenia, homelessness, physical disabilities, learning disabilities, and job loss. Just look at the obituaries of people who died in the hellish conditions on Rikers over the past year.
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Rikers Island is still full of people who have been failed by our society, time and again. New York City’s incarceration rates have been reduced in response to decades of grassroots organizing, but we have a long way to go. Our so-called progressive city continues to respond to crime rather than prevent it to allow freedom to be determined by wealth and racial bias to tear people away from their communities without due process and subject them to abuse, increasing their chances of future criminal legal system involvement rather than reducing them and to spend lavishly to do it, at more than $556,000 per incarcerated person per year. The moral costs of this stain on our city outweigh even the outrageous financial ones. There is no more tragic example of this than Rikers Island, where conditions are so dire that hundreds of incarcerated people have launched a hunger strike. Throughout his campaign, Mayor Eric Adams spoke about the dysfunction that plagues our city, stemming from a failure to go ‘upstream’ to address the problems we face. Eric Adams at church (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
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