https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-rikers-island
New York is building the world’s tallest jail in Chinatown. Can anyone stop it?
Planners say the facility will help heal the criminal justice system. But local residents see a brutal symbol of incarceration
Wilfred Chan in New York
Mon 21 Aug 2023
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For nearly two centuries, New York City’s Chinatown has been home to a quintessentially American story: immigrant workers and their families living shoulder-to-shoulder in low-slung tenements. Workers like Dennis Chung, the owner of Pasteur Grill and Noodles, a Vietnamese pho joint he’s run at the neighborhood’s western edge for 27 years – weathering disasters like 9/11, Hurricane Sandy and Covid.
Now another symbol of the American condition is taking shape, directly across from Chung’s shop: a vast new jail. At about 300ft, the new structure is expected to be the tallest correctional facility in the world. And Chung says it could be the thing that finally sinks his business. “With the jail on top of the pandemic, it might be over,” he tells me in Cantonese.
City officials and justice reform advocates say the new jail is a necessary project if they’re going to close Rikers Island, the notoriously grim jail that New York’s city council voted to shut down in 2019. That vote ordered the facility replaced by 2027 with four smaller jails throughout the city, including the one in Chinatown – which planners say will be a more humane institution conveniently located steps from downtown courthouses.
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The tower will replace a much shorter jail that’s been on the site since the 1980s. But construction is well behind schedule, partially due to years of resistance from a diverse coalition that includes everyone from prison abolitionists to local landlords to, at one point, Eric Adams, who pledged to oppose the new jail when campaigning for mayor. They argue it will be an eyesore that could harm some of New York’s most vulnerable immigrants, and that its multibillion-dollar price could be far better spent elsewhere.
Adams reversed course after taking office, and now the building crews have finally arrived. Today, lunchtime conversations at Pasteur Grill and Noodles are shattered by the crashing of demolition – the overture to a process that might well last a decade. “So I’ll just need to put up with this,” says Chung, “or retire early.”
How did New York City end up moving forward with such a controversial carceral structure in the heart of its downtown? Is it, as opponents say, an ugly symbol of mass incarceration – or, as planners believe, a sign of a city slowly but surely righting its criminal justice ills? And could there still be a better way?
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The saga begins at Rikers Island: 413 acres in the East River, a stone’s throw from the runways at LaGuardia airport, and the site of one of the most hellish penal facilities in the country. Though 85% of Rikers inmates have not been convicted and are simply waiting for a trial, the average detainee is held in the facility for nearly four months – four times the national average – and a disturbing number of people languish there for years, or have ended up dead.
In 2023, seven inmates have died, bringing the total death count since Adams took office to 26 – a toll that federal prosecutors have called “a collective failure with deep roots”. Investigators have found crumbling buildings, unsanitary conditions and Rikers guards systemically abusing inmates, and a federal judge has threatened to place the jail under federal control if the city can’t end the chaos.
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There’s no serious debate, even in Chinatown, about whether Rikers needs to be shut down. The real controversy has always been over what to do afterward.
One of the proponents of “borough-based jails” – the plan for four new structures, in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Manhattan – is Dana Kaplan, a prison reform advocate who in 2018 became deputy director of the then mayor Bill de Blasio’s office of criminal justice, where she helped conceptualize the proposal. Now she’s a senior adviser on the city’s independent commission for criminal justice reform. “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to try and transform the city’s criminal justice system into something that is more humane,” she says.
….. In Chinatown, the jail tower will replace a brutalist-style, 15-floor, 900-bed detention center called “the Tombs”, also known for its grim conditions. The revamped facility is expected to have roughly the same bed count, but with new quality-of-life features like recreation centers, health clinics and visitation areas with children’s playrooms – all things that residents, family members and staff requested during “hundreds of hours” of focus groups, Kaplan says. “It would be a fundamentally different experience for people who are incarcerated, but also for staff.”
That, Kaplan says, explains why the new jail must be taller. “Just being frank, it was impossible to achieve those elements in the square footage provided by the existing department of corrections facilities,” she says.
….. It’s kind of like building a bridge as you’re crossing over it,” says Jan Lee, a local landlord and founder of Neighbors United Below Canal Street, a group that opposes the new jail.
Based on the new jail’s approved zoning permit, Lee anticipates a “massive building, extending two to three blocks in every direction, that rises as tall as the Statue of Liberty” – which stands at 305ft. “This is going to be the beacon of Chinatown,” he says. “No matter where you look downtown, you will see this jail.” When it’s coupled with the city’s criminal court, and another federal prison a few blocks down, “Chinatown will be known as Jail Town,” he says.
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Christopher Marte, a local progressive city councilman who also joined the protest, says the delays are an opportunity. He thinks there’s a good chance that by the time the city is ready to break ground on Chinatown’s new jail – currently estimated to cost more than $2bn – it won’t have enough money to pull it off. “They’re going to get to a point where they can’t build the tallest jail. And they might have to take what we’ve been pitching, which is adaptive reuse of the space,” he says. “So this is not a done deal.”
….. The residents of Chinatown also appear to have given up. Last week, at a long-awaited town hall in the neighborhood with Adams, Jan Lee was the sole resident who questioned the mayor about the jail. Lee didn’t demand the jail be stopped – but only asked Adams for “a seat at the design table to make sure that this is right size, right scale and right for our community with the least amount of impact”.
Adams agreed. He also reminded the audience that the jail wasn’t his idea: “I would have done it differently. But that’s the reality, that I inherited a broken city that we have to now fix.” Then he issued a dark warning of what could happen if the new jail didn’t get built. “We’re going to have to take [Rikers residents] who may have done violent crimes, and because we don’t have any room, we’re going to put them back on the streets? I have a problem with that.”
Nobody in the room challenged him. The opposition was tired. The world’s tallest jail inched closer to reality.
What else could one do? “We already tried opposing it, protesting it, and it didn’t work,” says Chung, the noodle shop owner. “I just hope they build it faster, so things can hopefully get back to normal.”
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