There won’t enough space to hold everyone who needs to be jailed

New York City is on a course for disaster if it continues with the plan to close down Rikers Island. Simply put, the Rikers plan is to build just 3,300 jail beds in four borough-based jails in NYC and close down Rikers by 2027 while increasing the use of supervised release to lower the jail population.

What will happen when New York only has 3,300 jail beds? The city’s jail population is currently around 6,000. Since February 2021, it has ranged from 5,400 to 6,000. Just a year ago, it was 5,461. (For perspective, In the 1990s the city’s jails peaked at more than 20,000. As recently as January 2019, it was 8,212.) To get to 3,300, the city must lower the current population by 2,700.

Of the more than 6,000 inmates in city custody last month, about 4,000 (66%) were charged with murder or violent felonies — attempted murder, robbery, burglary, serious assault, rape, or gun possession. The percentage of inmates charged with violent felonies in the city’s jails has remained relatively constant since bail reform, ranging between 60-70% and numbering close to 4,000 inmates.

Nobody seriously expects crime in New York to go down over the next few years. At best, the crime rate will level off at close to the current higher numbers and the number of inmates will remain close to the current jail population of 6,000 or higher well into this decade.

Now, suppose for a moment the city had to get the current jail population down to 3,300. To do that, the city would have to release 2,700 inmates — 700 of the 4,000 inmates charged with violent felonies plus every one of the 2,000 other people held in city jails for any reason. That would include every single person charged with drug dealing, car theft, shoplifting, commercial burglary, strong arm robbery, misdemeanor assault, probation and parole violations, and violations of protective orders, as well as anyone serving a sentence of less than one year.

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What will happen when we release 2,700 more inmates from Rikers? When bail reform took effect in January 2020, the city released more than 2,000 inmates —every person charged with drug dealing, car theft, shoplifting, residential burglary, commercial burglary, strong arm robbery, and misdemeanor assault, among other crimes. Within two and a half months, by March 15, 2020, before COVID, crime went up 20% in NYC, after having declined every year for 27 years.

Overall, serious crime in NYC is now up 46% so far this year when compared to the same period in 2019, before bail reform. NYC was safer when those 2,000 inmates were in jail.

What will judges do when the jails are full at just 3,300 violent felons? Judges won’t be able to sentence career non-violent criminals to less than a year in jail, nor set bail on people charged with non-violent felonies no matter what their record, as there will be no room at the inn.

They will have to triage the violent felons they set bail on to the worst of the worst of the worst. In other words, thousands of career criminals and recidivists will be released without bail. As the city desperately tries to cram prisoners in under-capacity jails, defender and activist organizations (which lobbied for the close Rikers plan) will sue the city for deplorable overcrowding, compelling federal judges and correction monitors to order the release of inmates.

Proponents of closing Rikers recommend more supervised release as an alternative to jail to lower the jail population. But according to the NYS Unified Court System website, 46% of the NYC defendants released on non-monetary conditions (supervised release) in the first six months of 2022 with a prior conviction or pending case were rearrested while their case was pending. The rearrest rate was 54% for those charged with residential burglary, 68% for commercial burglary and 70% for petit larceny. Releasing even more dangerous recidivists to supervised release is not the answer. The city is safer when repeat offenders are in jail.

It is a sad commentary on our times when our legislators resort to slogans and ideological mantras when discussing policy. That is what the debate about Rikers has always been. It’s sad also because the people of this city, mostly minority, are suffering the results of these awful decisions. To claim that we can safely reduce the jail population to a totally inadequate 3,300 beds for a city of 8.4 million people is not just irresponsible, it is dishonest.

Quinn was executive district attorney in the Queens district attorney’s office, where he served for 42 years.