Rikers Island NYC jail had to be closed by 2027

NYC jail in Rikers Island has to be closed and replaced with other facilities in each borough, excluding Staten Island, to the end of 2027. That is what shows the plan of New York City. But the new facilities has to hold only 3300 beds when now the Island has more than 4000 people, and before the pandemic their number was 6000. If the pandemic could release 2000 people without noticeable effect on the crime, why the city is not releasing more prisoners that are not threat to the community.

On the contrary, a new surge happened this summer with rising number of prisoners with lots of ?new death cases that happened this month there, and the city is in collapse.

That caused the district attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams to decide to take over the jail from the city. The decision will depend on the Chief Judge Laura Swain of the Southern District Court of New York to keep the status quo or to take over the jail from the city administration.

Mayor Adams feels betrayed by the colleagues from the federal office, who think that his administration is unable to deal with the problem, as the previous administrations were unable either. The problem is not only with the jail itself and the inhumane conditions in it, but the whole judicial reform that has to be done in the USA that nobody talks about, but just is forwarding the problems from one body to another instead to deal really with them.

District Attorney Damian Williams has to look in his own inability to deal with the fake cases his administration is producing in thousands, in the politicized prosecutions and totally inadequateness of his sentencing. That is where the case of Ryker Island falls also. In the inability of the judicial reform to reform the punishment and the correction. You can’t correct people just by isolating them from the other inmates, as the jail has done by locking the inmates in solitary confinement. Keeping an inmate in solitary confinement is illegal according to the international laws, and after fifteen days is considered torture. Also the city had adopted the law named by the name of?Martin Luther King against the solitary confinement, but nobody cares about that new law. Now the city is facing lawsuits of more than 53 millions about unlawful detention in solitary confinement.

Why Mr. Damian Williams doesn’t think about the same that is happening in the federal jail in Brooklyn, Metropolitan Detention Center, where his people are being kept after the closure of the facility in Manhattan, the Metropolitan Correctional Center. There people stay for more than 6 months in solitary confinement, while the main witness in the noisy El Chapo case, without being indicted in anything, was residing with the people she had to witness against. And where prisoners have been tortured by forcing them to eat, like in Guantanamo, strapping them to a chair and forcefully pouring in their throats. What was correctional in this center was that people have been kept in inhumane conditions in pretrial, just to confess what they have not committed, like the case of Jeffrey Epstein, who suicide in solitary confinement. Actually many inmates still are suing the Federal jails in the city of New York for inhumane conditions and the federal court is not moving the cases, as is necessary, trying to dismiss them.

What this third party will do with Rikers Island is not very clear, when the whole justice system is on limb and needs total correction. We can’t keep 6000 people in one of the best areas of the city. It is a crime against the citizens. It is not correctional, it is just inhumane.

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