New York plan to close notorious prison clears hurdle
New York’s government moved a step closer to shutting the city’s notorious Rikers Island prison on Tuesday after a key department voted to replace the sprawling complex with smaller jails.
Rikers is one of America’s most high-profile prisons and has incarcerated celebrities including Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, rapper Tupac Shakur and former International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
But lawyers and criminologists have been calling for the prison’s closure for years, citing its age and regular violent incidents against both inmates and guards that are blamed in part on its remote location, which makes family visits difficult.
On Tuesday, the city government’s planning commission voted 9-3 in favor of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s proposal to close down Rikers by 2026 and replace it with four smaller jails.
“The era of mass incarceration didn’t begin in New York City -- but it will END here,” de Blasio wrote on Twitter.
De Blasio unveiled plans to shut Rikers -- which consists of nine facilities and is located on an island on the East River between the city’s Queens and Bronx boroughs -- in 2017.
His administration argues that four new prisons to be built in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx will be more humane, safer and easier for relatives of inmates to visit.
While there is widespread agreement that Rikers should be closed, de Blasio has faced considerable criticism for wanting to build the new prisons and protesters chanted “No new jails!” during Tuesday’s vote.
Rikers Island is one of the most recognizable of US prison names, together with Sing Sing, located in Ossining in New York state, San Quentin in California and ADX in Colorado, a so-called “supermax” prison nicknamed the “Alcatraz of the Rockies.”
The number of inmates at Rikers has fallen from around 20,000 in the 1990s to around 8,000 currently.
The proposal now heads to the New York city council for final approval. A vote is expected this fall.
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