As Mayor-elect Mamdani presses to close the jail complex, what comes after should come into sharper focus.
The election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s 111th mayor is expected to usher in significant policy shifts at City Hall. One area certain to receive fresh attention is the fate of Rikers Island — the 415-acre land mass situated in the East River between the Bronx and Queens and home to one of the nation’s largest and most notorious jail complexes.
For decades, human rights advocates have sounded the alarm regarding the violence, cruelty and inhumane conditions facing detainees (the vast majority of whom are awaiting trial), the dangers to Correction Department officers, the enormous cost of running this complex (hundreds of thousands of dollars per detainee per year) and the failure of the corrections system to prepare those confined there to successfully re-enter society. This year alone, 14 people have died in Department of Correction’s custody.
Rikers as we know it rightly remains on the path to closure.
In 2017, in the first of more than a dozen authoritative reports, the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice Reform — chaired by former Chief Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, Jonathan Lippman — branded the Rikers Island jail system “an international symbol of despair and damage” and concluded that ending incarceration there was “a moral imperative.”
In 2021, the City Council enacted historic legislation mandating an end to incarceration on Rikers Island by August 2027 — and charting a better course for the island’s future.
Significantly, this “Renewable Rikers” legislation — spearheaded by then-Councilmember Costa Constantinides — directed planning for post-incarceration land uses on Rikers Island for “sustainability and resiliency purposes.”
The administration of outgoing Mayor Eric Adams missed intermediate implementation deadlines and wobbled in its dedication to achieving the Renewable Rikers statutorily mandated August 2027 closure date.
Progress in constructing the borough-based jailhouses, where detainees are supposed to be housed when Rikers is shuttered, has proceeded slowly. At this point, they’re not scheduled to be completed until 2029, 2031 or 2032.
Even though it is likely that efforts to scale up community-based mental health resources, invest in supportive housing, speed pre-trial processing and accelerate completion of the borough-based jails will pick up steam under the Mamdani administration, meeting the August 2027 end-to-incarceration date for Rikers looks somewhere between implausible and impossible.
While attention has been focused on whether incarceration at Rikers will end in August 2027 or sometime thereafter, the question of what Rikers Island’s post-incarceration future will look like — whenever that future formally begins — has been largely ignored as of late by the city’s policy-debaters and decision-makers.
That should change. The transformation of Rikers Island into a world-class example of sustainable redevelopment, green jobs and reparative justice would be a legacy accomplishment for Mayor-elect Mamdani.
In case anyone was wondering, Rikers Island is ill-suited for residential development. It is largely constructed out of landfill composed of garbage and coal and incinerator ash. The result is an unstable foundation and frequent releases of methane, a highly flammable greenhouse gas. The island is also poorly served by public transportation and lies within a stone’s throw of LaGuardia airport; height restrictions are imposing; disruptive noise and jet fumes are unavoidable.
As the sponsors of the Renewable Rikers legislation understood, the island — because of its size and separation from populated neighborhoods — is a unique in-city location for erecting environmentally beneficial infrastructure, once the physical structures of its ignominious past are demolished.
To that end, the 2021 Renewable Rikers legislation directed city agencies to prepare feasibility studies analyzing the potential for such innovation.
The New York City Department of Environmental Protection (“DEP”) released one of these little-noticed studies in March 2024. It concluded that constructing a state-of-the-art wastewater treatment plant on Rikers Island would offer “a multitude of benefits that are not possible with the existing” system. According to the study, a modern wastewater treatment plant on Rikers would improve water quality in New York harbor; produce renewable green energy; capture stormwater and lessen in-city flooding; improve the Department’s operations and efficiency; and reduce the impact of the Department’s existing sewage plants on adjacent neighborhoods in the South Bronx and northern and eastern Queens.
DEP Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala, in the study’s introduction, wrote that a new Rikers Island wastewater treatment plant could “transform DEP’s operations…,” “would be technically feasible…,” and could well be “similar in cost” to rebuilding and upgrading the nearby aging sewage plants (which will be necessary as those decades-old plants reach the end of their useful lives).
A second study was released by the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice in February 2024. This one focused on the feasibility of building renewable energy infrastructure on Rikers Island. Its conclusions were similarly upbeat. It found that constructing a major solar installation, a large-scale battery storage facility (that could release clean energy into the grid during periods of peak demand), and an offshore wind converter station presents a “feasible” and “compelling alternative” to the city’s “current antiquated energy …infrastructure.”
Another promising land use that could slide in alongside these energy and wastewater treatment operations would be a contemporary organic materials composting facility. An NRDC analysis prepared by former Sanitation Commissioner Brendan Sexton concluded that establishing a major food scraps and yard waste composting plant on Rikers — on the scale of the Department’s Staten Island composting operation at Fresh Kills — would be feasible, cost-effective and necessary to achieve the city’s ambitious climate and waste reduction goals.
Since the release of the two feasibility studies in 2024, however, nothing has happened. The Eric Adams administration has failed to move things forward.
It hasn’t transferred land or buildings on the island that are no longer being used for incarceration purposes out of Department of Correction control, as the Renewable Rikers statute requires. And it has only sporadically convened the Rikers Island Advisory Committee, which by law was directed to advise City Hall on future uses of the island “for sustainability and resiliency purposes.”
An immediate next step is for City Hall to build upon the feasibility studies and map out a detailed master plan for a re-imagined Rikers Island. Fortunately, legislation advanced by Councilmember Sandy Nurse and her colleagues to direct exactly that has already been prepared and vetted and is awaiting a vote in the City Council.
The closure of Rikers Island may be delayed — but the brighter future of this piece of land should not be indefinitely put on hold. Imaginative thinking. Smart development. Improved public services. Renewable Rikers offers it all. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani can turn an island of shame into a showplace of sustainability. Under his leadership, a new Rikers Island can become part of his legacy of advancing not only social justice, but also savvy job-producing, green infrastructure redevelopment on a grand scale in the nation’s largest city.