NYC Mayor Eric Adams exploring abandoning current plan to shut down Rikers Island jail

Josephine Stratman, Graham Rayman and Chris Sommerfeldt, New York Daily News on May 2, 2025

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NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams is exploring a move to abandon the current plan to close Rikers Island, and instead and turn the borough-based sites intended to replace the notorious jail complex into housing, the Daily News has learned.

The mayor has asked top staffers to look into how many units of housing could be built at the borough sites in Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx, according to sources familiar with the matter.

City Hall is also looking into whether the Brooklyn site, which is currently under construction, could be turned into some kind of a mental health facility. About half the detainees at Rikers are suffering from some form of psychiatric disabilty.

A move to scrap the plan to close Rikers would have numerous hurdles to clear and would likley prompt significant backlash. It would also likely force a breach of a law mandating the city shut down the jail complex by August 2027.

Despite the many challenges, Adams, Randy Mastro, first deputy mayor, and Tiffany Raspberry, deputy mayor for intergovernmental affairs, have been in discussions about this idea, sources said.

When approached by The News outside City Hall Friday, Raspberry didn’t directly respond to questions about the efforts, though she did not deny they were underway. Mastro could not immediately be reached for comment. Spokespeople for the mayor did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

One of the sources familiar with the discussions said the plan is in its preliminary stages, and added there’s no known timeline for any official announcement.

To carry out a plan like this, the mayor would need Council’s approval to change the law mandating the closure of Rikers. If that didn’t happen and he went forward anyway, lawsuits would likely follow.

“Any attempt to reverse the law that requires the city to close Rikers is a useless, unproductive waste of f–king time,” Council Criminal Justice Committee Chairwoman Sandy Nurse, who has oversight over Rikers operations, said Friday, vowing that any such plan would be met with legal actions.

This move also raises questions about what would happen with the existing facilities at Rikers Island, which are decrepit and in need of significant repair. The city has been slow to invest in improvements under the expectation that new jails were coming soon. As time has passed, the cost of those renovations has increased.

Construction contracts for both Queens and the Bronx have been signed, in addition to Brooklyn, and the contract for the Manhattan site was being finalized as of February.

The mayor previously floated parts of this plan last month at the National Action Network forum.

“Instead of a jail, let’s build a state of the art psychiatric facility and give people the help that they need, and stop criminalizing people who are dealing with mental health issues, that’s what we should be doing, and not just building four smaller Rikers Islands,” Adams said onstage in April.

The city has lagged behind on following through with the law, and the administration has said they don’t expect to meet the 2027 deadline. The construction schedule for Brooklyn is already roughly three years beyond that deadline and the timelines for the completion of the others are further delayed.