{"id":76754,"date":"2020-09-28T03:43:19","date_gmt":"2020-09-28T00:43:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/bill-de-blasios-replace-rikers-plan-is-falling-completely-apart\/"},"modified":"2020-09-28T03:43:19","modified_gmt":"2020-09-28T00:43:19","slug":"bill-de-blasios-replace-rikers-plan-is-falling-completely-apart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/bill-de-blasios-replace-rikers-plan-is-falling-completely-apart\/","title":{"rendered":"#Bill de Blasio’s replace-Rikers plan is falling completely apart"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Bill de Blasio’s replace-Rikers plan is falling completely apart<\/strong>”
\n<\/p>\n

\n \u2018If he were serious about it, he would have started in the first year of his first term.\u2019<\/p>\n

Will Mayor de Blasio\u2019s plan to close Rikers be the left\u2019s Second Avenue subway \u2014 something all public officials favor but never accomplish? Hizzoner will leave office next year with no progress on his \u201cfour borough jails\u201d plan. His successor will care less.<\/p>\n

In his \u201cLast Subway\u201d book, Philip Plotch explains why, since 1903, generations of New York pols have promised a Second Avenue subway but never delivered. Yes, we finally have three East Side stops. But the original plan was from the East Bronx to lower Manhattan.<\/p>\n

The political calculus is simple: Because no one mayor or governor could ever hope to take credit for completing such a project within his term in office, no mayor or governor has made it a priority. Who wants to take on a headache only to see his successor claim the accolades?<\/p>\n

De Blasio devised a shortcut: taking the credit first. \u201cThe era of mass incarceration is over,\u201d he said last October, when the City Council passed the plan to build one jail apiece in lower Manhattan, Kew Gardens, the south Bronx and central Brooklyn, thus shuttering the island jails. Over!<\/p>\n

Well, the era of mass incarceration has long been over. As the Mayor\u2019s Office of Criminal Justice notes, \u201cboth crime and the use of jail have been falling steadily in New York City for 20 years,\u201d with incarceration down 51 percent since 1999, far lower than other US cities.<\/p>\n

Yet the anti-jails movement seized on Rikers as a symbol \u2014 and the mayor obliged.<\/p>\n

Closing Rikers, though, would be the most ambitious infrastructure project the city has managed in modern history: $9 billion to build four high-rise jails in four dense neighborhoods by 2026. So if he were serious about it, he would have started in the first year of his first term, not halfway through his second.<\/p>\n

Now the plan has suffered two setbacks. Last week, a state judge upheld a suit filed against the Chinatown jail by a grassroots group, Neighbors United Below Canal. NUBC alleged that the city abused the state\u2019s environmental process in doing its study for one potential downtown site, then abruptly switching to another location.<\/p>\n

The city also failed to look at the public-health impacts, as the law requires, \u201cpurportedly completed environmental .\u2009.\u2009. review .\u2009.\u2009. before the project had even been designed\u201d and failed to consider alternatives.<\/p>\n

The judge decided that the city had committed an \u201cerror of law.\u201d Two similar suits against the Bronx and Queens jails are pending.<\/p>\n

Contrary to popular belief, it isn\u2019t easy to stop a project with a lawsuit. The city was sloppy. \u201cIt\u2019s not rocket science<\/a>,\u201d says Karen Mintzer, NUBC attorney. Now, the ruling causes a delay, at best.<\/p>\n

Except the city has already delayed. In this year\u2019s budget, de Blasio slashed the project by $500\u2009million and delayed some spending as late as 2029. As the council\u2019s finance director noted, \u201cContinued delays of these projects into years beyond the current administration decrease the chances of these jails being built.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mayor who will cut nothing immedia<\/a>tely cut this.<\/p>\n

The longer the city dithers, the more facts intrude. The new jails will have a capacity of just 3,544 beds. Even as the city has released inmates during the pandemic, the jail population still stood at 3,981 in late May. Since then, violent crime has risen, including crimes allegedly committed by recently \u00adreleased arrestees.<\/p>\n

Then there is a risk the city never considered in its environmental review: the probability that borough-based jails would attract sustained protest. A new jail in lower Manhattan would be a magnet for the \u201coccupy and vandalize\u201d crowd. Already, engineering firms are wary of being associated with a high-profile jail.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s even less wise than it was last year to destabilize stable neighborhoods, when the city must retain its tax base.<\/p>\n

Now the jails plan has lost the only thing going for it: a political champion. Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker who app<\/a>roved it, had a stake. But he is no longer running for mayor.<\/p>\n

The next mayor isn\u2019t going to want to spend a first term, and then some, focusing on the marquee infrastructure of the last mayor.<\/p>\n

The best outcome is the alternative de Blasio refused to consider: modern jails at Rikers. The more likely outcome is that the inmates keep waiting, just as the East Bronx is still waiting for its subway.<\/p>\n

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute\u2019s City Journal.<\/em>\n <\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Bill de Blasio’s replace-Rikers plan is falling completely apart” \u2018If he were serious about it, he would have started in the first year of his first term.\u2019 Will Mayor de Blasio\u2019s plan to close Rikers be the left\u2019s Second Avenue subway \u2014 something all public officials favor but never accomplish? Hizzoner will leave office next…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":76755,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/09\/Mayor_de-Blasio_04A.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[73120,5042,72202,71050,73226],"class_list":["post-76754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-9-27-20","tag-bill-de-blasio","tag-criminal-justice-reforms","tag-jail","tag-rulings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76754\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}