REIMAGINING RIKERS ISLAND: A RESTORATIVE JUSTICE APPROACH
by
Max J. Gottlieb
Received and approved:
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REIMAGINING RIKERS ISLAND: A RESTORATIVE JUSTICE APPROACH
by
Max J. Gottlieb
Ⓒ2020 Max J. Gottlieb
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in City and Regional Planning School of Architecture Pratt Institute
February 2020
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my advisors who guided and supported me through this process: Jen Becker and Courtney Knapp, as well as Ayse Yonder, John Shapiro and Beth Bingham. I would also like to thank those who provided the time and patience to share their professional and personal experiences about Rikers Island, land use and incarceration.
I am particularly inspired by the writings of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Jack Norton,
Jarrod Shanahan, and Brett Story, all of whom provided great context for understanding Rikers Island in the age of mass imprisonment. This research would not be possible without the dedicated work of communities across New York City challenging the status quo of incarceration and actualizing the dream of a world without prisons.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Introduction 1 1.1 Statement of the Issue 1.2 Goal and Objectives 1.3 Methodology 1.4 Organization of Study 1.5 Literature Review 1.6 Summary
Chapter 2: Overview of Rikers Island 21 2.1 Legacy of Rikers Island 2.2 Borough-Based Jail Plan 2.3 Redevelopment Proposals 2.4 Summary
Chapter 3: Stakeholder Evaluation and Best Practices 41 3.1 Interview Procedures 3.2 Stakeholder Details 3.3 Key Findings 3.4 Best Practices 3.5 Summary
Chapter 4: Recommendations and Conclusion 53 4.1 Findings 4.2 Recommendations 4.3 Limitations 4.4 Areas for Further Research 4.5 Conclusion
Works Cited 66
Appendix 74
…It is also time to look ahead to how our city can repurpose this island, which has been a symbol and accelerator of misery for so many, and turn it to the use for public good.
— Jonathan Lippman, Former Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals
New York is like an Island, a big Rikers Island - The cops be out wilding, all I hear is sirens - It’s all about surviving, same old two step. — Nas, "The Don" (2012)
“Prisons and prison populations are a reflection of what takes place outside of the prisons. . .The direct relationship constitutes the basis by which we propose that there are no prison problems, only community problems. Once we begin to address community problems, prison problems will also be addressed.”
— Eddie Ellis, Founder of the Center for NuLeadership
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
1.1 ISSUE STATEMENT
In 2016, then-City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito launched the
Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration
Reform, which was led by former New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman.
The Commission was formed in response to a growing activist movement calling for the closure of Rikers Island, the notoriously violent and deteriorating city jail.
A little over three years later, on October 17, 2019, the New York City Council passed a plan that would replace Rikers with four borough-based jails in its stead.
The contentious $10 billion plan proposed a downsized Rikers population to be moved to smaller, localized facilities, with greater proximity to courthouses and communities. The plan also included investments in alternatives to incarceration and other neighborhood-centric programming. The plan faces significant challenges ahead, but leaves the fate of the storied 400-acre island unclear. Rarely does such a large parcel of land become available for redevelopment in a city where every inch of real estate is commodified and prized. The island also has severe limitations: limited accessibility, hazardous and contaminated land, and a brutal legacy that has left a devastating impact on communities, families and neighbors.
Like most institutions in the criminal justice system, the facilities of Rikers have historically consisted of Black and Latinx men from a handful of outer-borough neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are the victims of racist urban policies of
1 redlining, urban renewal, and zero tolerance policing that have led to their divestment over decades, and still suffer from high rates of poverty, unemployment and high-risk housing. Incarceration is a powerful force in many communities; it interacts with all of the social determinants, impacting the health of people and communities across the country.
Reformation of the American carceral system is now in mainstream political discourse. As governments begin to recognize community calls to reassess the impacts of the criminal justice system on low-income and high-needs populations, local officials and planners have an opportunity to work with communities to develop a future for Rikers based on collaborative decision-making. How can the redevelopment of Rikers Island be used to invest in justice-involved communities?
Three main research questions guided this thesis:
1. What opportunities exist to redevelop Rikers Island?
2. How can the reimagining of Rikers incorporate a community-driven framework?
3. How are restorative justice frameworks applied in urban planning?
1.2 GOAL AND OBJECTIVES
The goal of this thesis is to explore the issues and best practices of facilitating a revisioning of post-carceral land and how this can be applied to Rikers Island.
Primarily, this study seeks to contribute to a growing body of research about the intersection of land use, decarceration and restorative justice planning.
2 The first objective of this study is to understand the context of incarceration and its socioeconomic impacts, the current efforts to reuse carceral facilities, and the framework of restorative justice through an extensive literature review.
The second objective is to understand the existing conditions and history of Rikers
Island and examine redevelopment proposals.
The third objective is to understand the development potential of Rikers through the lens of restorative justice.
The fourth objective is to provide recommendations to the City of New York for the redevelopment of Rikers Island and incorporate community-led decision- making processes.
1.3 METHODOLOGY
This study employs a mixed methodology. The literature review in Chapter One will provide context for understanding the legacy of Rikers Island on New York City’s poorest communities, as well as the opportunity for the redevelopment of Rikers.
The literature review is comprised of two major themes: first, a survey of incarceration, decarceration and its impact on community. This includes the spatial and socioeconomic analysis of incarcerated populations and the reuse of carceral facilities. The second section is an overview of restorative justice theory and key concepts as a framework for planning. This section also includes contemporary theories of abolition and equity planning as approaches for the redistribution of power in the context of decarceration. Chapter Two examines existing plans and
3 reports for redeveloping Rikers Island put forth by independent commissions, elected officials, advocacy organizations and design firms. News media, conferences and community meetings regarding proposed plans for Rikers are also utilized. Lastly, Chapter Three utilizes interviews with 13 stakeholders who represent community organizing and policy-making institutions. Interviews provided substantial depth to each of the plans, as well as identify development benchmarks and criteria. Interviews in Chapter Three are supported by ‘best practices’ from three comparable projects.
1.4 ORGANIZATION OF STUDY
Chapter One: Introduction and Literature Review
Chapter Two: Understanding Rikers: Context, History, Redevelopment
Chapter Three: Stakeholder Evaluation and Best Practices
Chapter Four: Recommendations
1.5 LITERATURE REVIEW
The aim of this literature review is twofold. The first part of the review provides a survey of the prevalence and impact of carceral facilities in the United States. This section builds upon research that explores the disparate impact of incarceration on low-income and Black communities. The section will also discuss approaches to decommissioned carceral land and theory.
The second section explores restorative justice as a framework for planning in the context of decarceration. After establishing the impact of correctional facilities on
4 low-income communities, how do we mitigate it using an approach rooted in healing, reintegration and mediation? This section includes an exploration of the work in contemporary fields of scholarship like abolition and equity planning that contribute to the decarceration movement.
I. INCARCERATION, DECARCERATION AND REUSE
IMPACTS OF INCARCERATION ON LOW-INCOME COMMUNITIES
As of 2019, the United States remains the most incarcerated nation in the world: the U.S. justice system holds nearly 2.3 million people between state and federal prisons, juvenile correctional facilities, and local jails, as well as state psychiatric hospitals, military prisons, immigration detention facilities and prisons in U.S. territories (Sawyer & Wagner, 2019, 22; Drucker, 2011; Kang-Brown et al., 2019).
Correctional control extends beyond incarceration with an additional 3.6 million people who are on probation and 840,000 on parole (Jones, 2018; Kaeble, 2016).
The criminal justice system is defined by racial disparity: Black men are imprisoned at six times the rate White men are (Bronson & Carson, 2017, 1). 33 percent of state and federal prison inmates are Black, despite making up only 13 percent of the nation’s population (Subramanian, Riley and Mai, 2018, 12). And one in three
Black men is incarcerated in jail or prison, or is on probation or parole (Alexander,
2010, 4).
Public scrutiny of the nation’s bloated criminal justice system has gained tremendous momentum in recent years, characterized by the success of Michelle
Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010) and Ava DuVernay’s film 13th (2016), which examine the disproportionate impact of incarceration on Black communities. The
5 #BlackLivesMatter movement propelled high-profile police killings of Michael
Brown and Freddie Gray into political action on the streets and demanded the decriminalization of blackness. Ideology of penal reform is undergoing a major about-face in the political realm as well, with the majority of Democratic presidential candidates promoting some variation of decarceration and widespread denouncement of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act passed under President Bill Clinton, which contributed to a detrimental increase in incarceration (Eisen, 2016).
Research on the social impacts of imprisonment has widened, revealing a pervasive force that shapes nearly every facet of post-carceral life: former inmates have difficulty accessing affordable housing, endure strained familial relationships, encounter barriers to employment and typically are financial unstable (Crutchfield and Weeks, 2001). The linkages between poverty and incarceration has never been so visible and has come to define many of the most explosive cases in recent history. This is most clearly illustrated in city jails, where the majority of people held are awaiting pretrial, which is dependent upon the detained person’s ability to pay bonds, disproportionately affecting the poor.
ROOTED IN PLACE
In addition to the toll detention takes on an individual, incarceration has significant impacts on communities at large. Research on the relationships between poverty and incarceration clearly indicate geographic concentration; prisoners come from and return to a select number of disproportionately disadvantaged communities.
The relationship between the racialization of incarceration and prison expansion inextricably linked to localized urban conditions (Story, 2016; Wacquant, 2001).
6 Over the past four decades, exponential prison expansion and the introduction of harsh “tough on crime” legislation has torn through Black communities across the
United States. In her landmark book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and
Opposition in Globalizing California (2007), scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore refers to prison and its expansion as “a geographical solution that purports to solve social problems” (14).
Released inmates return to society at a disadvantage. Justice-involved individuals tend to return to their neighborhoods that are already distressed. Of formerly incarcerated individuals, 98 percent will return to the community they came from and nearly two thirds will end up back in prison (Tucker and Cadora, 2003, 3).
These communities are characterized by cycles of poverty, homelessness, fractured relationships, and limited economic opportunity that incarceration simultaneously contributes to and extracts from. Incarceration is so commonplace in many communities that “among low-skill black men, spending time in prison has become a normative life event, furthering their segregation from mainstream society”
(Pettit, 2012, 10).
CARCERAL GEOGRAPHY
In New York City, geographic concentration of incarceration is exemplified in prison admissions data. The data reveals that a disproportionate number of inmates are extracted from a handful of low-income neighborhoods. In large cities, prison admissions are so concentrated in low-income neighborhoods that some single city blocks are now recognized as “million-dollar blocks,” referring to the amount of state money spent to incarcerate residents of one city block (Kurgan and
Cadora, 2008, 3). Million-dollar blocks demonstrate the spatial relationship
7 between urban divestment and the cost of carceral expansion (Story, 2016). This type of analysis is important to understanding not only the way incarceration impacts distinct communities but also how it functions within the larger organism of the city:
With this map, we stop talking about where to deploy police resources or how to track individual prisoners for institutional purposes; instead, we begin to assess the impact of justice on a city, even a city block, and start to evaluate some of the implicit decisions and choices we have been making about our civic institutions (Kurgan and Cadora, 2008, 7).
The spatial linkage to the carceral state has been explored further in a subdiscipline termed carceral geography. This field deploys varying scales of analysis to understand larger structural functions of incarceration and can help explore the impact of an institution like Rikers on neighborhoods. Geographer Dominique
Moran defined carceral geography as a subfield that “focuses of practices of incarceration, viewing ‘carceral space’ broadly as a type of institution whose distributional geographies, and geographies of internal and external social and spatial relations should be explored” (Moran, 2013). This approach has been used to excavate connections between criminal justice systems, space and the physical body. Many geographers have used Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as the foundational text for understanding these dynamics, arguing that a punitive ideology transcends prisons and is found in most of society’s institutions. Some authors, such as Gilmore, have used carceral geography as the narrative framework to understand prison expansion and policy.
The field of carceral geography has been used to understand the syphoning of people of color through mass incarceration into rural municipalities as a tool of economic development and divestment. Rural White communities have benefitted from prison development by increasing “their share of federal grants and political
8 representation; the impoverished urban communities that these prisoners leave behind lose funds and representation” (Hooks, et al., 2004). Bonds notes that by
“underscoring the linkages between dispossession and disinvestment across these places opens up the possibility for a more critical dialogue about the consequences of mass incarceration for rural and urban communities” (2009). Detention facilities can often serve as the largest local employer in these areas where industrial businesses moved out, leaving behind a void for prisons to fill. Thus, prison building in rural areas has been framed as a form of economic development, with towns vying for facilities to fulfill promises of new jobs.
JUSTICE REINVESTMENT
Justice reinvestment is a recent fiscal and criminal justice policy that addresses the huge financial, physical and social toll that incarceration takes on low-income urban neighborhoods (Brown, Schwartz and Boseley, 2012). Justice reinvestment proposes a diversion of funds that would be spent on incarceration towards repairing infrastructure and investing in assets for the most severely impacted communities (Tucker and Cadora, 2003). These ideas have contributed to the launch of the federally-funded Justice Reinvestment Initiative, a data-driven approach which partners with states and municipalities to reinvest in the public realm while reducing spending on criminal justice. The Initiative provides technical assistance and uses data on corrections populations and costs to identify where incarceration is high and target services to vulnerable populations (Davies, Harvell and Cramer, 2015).
9 REUSE OF CARCERAL FACILITIES
Criminal justice reform is now an accepted talking point in the political mainstream
– nearly every 2020 Democratic presidential candidate has announced a plan for varying degrees of decarceration. The adoption of sentencing reform, decriminalization of marijuana, elimination of mandatory minimums and alternatives to incarceration programs indicate that public opinion has shifted on incarceration.
As the politics of prisons are scrutinized and inmate populations have plateaued, states and municipalities wrestle with large scars, costs and impacts of carceral facilities. Many states and municipalities are beginning to consider how these sites can be repurposed for a variety of uses. The high costs of detention facilities and their impact on vulnerable demographics has forced local and state governments to reconsider the needs of the demographics and neighborhoods most severely impacted by the facility’s presence. In this sense “prison closures provide an opening to reimagine economic challenges in impacted communities” (Porter,
2016, 7).
There are numerous recent examples of prison repurposing that address community needs through the leasing of publicly-owned land to a non-profit service provider. These public-private partnerships contain the potential to bring a public good to the area, but they can drive a political wedge between politicians, residents and other stakeholders.
Some adaptive reuse projects have worked to directly respond to the conditions of incarceration and reentry. In 2011, under the gubernatorial administration of
Andrew Cuomo, New York closed thirteen prisons across the region in response to
10 a decrease in crime, reformation of laws for nonviolent offenders and an attempt to help close the budget gap (Kaplan, 2011; Porter, 2016). Among those abandoned was the Fulton Correctional Facility in the Bronx which, through a $6 million grant from Empire State Development Corporation, was converted into a community reentry center for formerly incarcerated individuals that offers temporary housing, workforce training, as well as health and legal programs (Kaplan, 2011; Porter,
2016).
Other developments work with specific subpopulations, such as youth, in an effort to target unmet needs. The Apache County Juvenile Detention Center in rural
Arizona was converted into the LOFT Legacy Teen Center following a statewide effort to repurpose detention centers that were on the brink of closure (Love,
Harvell, Warnberg and Durnan, 2018). The county identified a lack of social services for youth in the area and those needs were incorporated into LOFT, which offers communal space, free internet and a music room for high schoolers (Love, et al.,
2018).
In rural areas, where detention facilities can often serve as the largest local employer, economic development and jobs are often identified as the highest priorities cited for closed or closing carceral facilities. The Tryon Juvenile Detention
Facility in Fulton County, New York repurposed its juvenile facilities into the Tryon
Technology Park which was entrusted from the state to the county development corporation (Porter, 2016; Love, et al., 2018). With grants from Empire State
Development and the county, Fulton County Industrial Development Agency
(FCIDA) has created a new hub of industrial and commercial activity, connecting local workforce to the Technology Park.
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The exploration of a “usable carceral past” has been pursued by geographer Karen
Morin, who has identified the decommissioning of prisons and jails as an opportunity for scrutiny (Morin, 2013). The usable past, in this instance, is that the history, memories and structures of the past can inform the present, and that place is particular, is valuable to understanding the impacts prisons have on our lives.
There are a multitude of ways we can choose to remember and explore incarceration, and one of the most prominent ways is through the prison museum.
“DARK” TOURISM AND THE PRISON MUSEUM
A growing body of scholarship on “penal tourism” explores the relationship between memory, punishment and public spectacle in detention facilities.
Decommissioned prisons like Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia and
Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco are huge destinations for an emerging industry of tourism. These facilities are typically turned into objectionable, if not vexing, uses that detract from the harsh realities of the criminal justice system. This is what
Morin has referred to as, “dark” prison tourism; the capitalization of suffering and violence as a means of entertainment:
Prison museums offer important opportunities to engage audiences in a
conversation about the problems of mass incarceration, but these opportunities are
mostly lost. Because they are typically positioned as regimes of the past, their
narratives tend to be organized around the idea of penal reform—they tend to
argue that the carceral present is somehow an improvement over the past (2013,
13).
12 In Boston, the old Charles Street Jail, which closed in 1990 was eventually converted into the 300-bed luxury Liberty Hotel, replete with gimmicky restaurants and bars such as Clink and The Yard, sardonically named in tribute to its past
(Davis, 2014). Perhaps the most disturbing example is the Louisiana State Prison at
Angola, which holds an annual rodeo, casting inexperienced inmates as the entertainment for an eager public (Adams, 2001).
COMMUNITY-LED REDEVELOPMENT
Most often, case studies indicate that community organizations and activists are the essential catalyst in advocating for better alternatives to carceral facilities. This is often the result of multi-year campaigns and consistent political involvement.
Significant organizing and community pushback stalled a $20 million jail expansion plan in Champaign, Illinois with the deterioration of the city’s downtown detention facility (Davis, 2014). Through weekly attendance of board meetings and pushing to reshape the decision-making process, the Champaign-Urbana Citizens for Peace and Justice (CUCPJ) persuaded the county to hire a consultant to conduct a needs assessment. CUCPJ’s steering of the process involved greater public participation in the creation of a Community Justice Task Force and connected with organizations that would support a policy to ‘Build Programs Not Jails’ (Kilgore,
2014).
In Peoria, Illinois, a little over an hour away from Champaign, local residents have advocated for the transformation of the former Hanna City detention facility into a small farm incubator. Supporters have laid out a plan to convert the 40-acre plot of land into a destination for farm training that could collaborate with local universities and government agencies to expand Illinois’ growing number of food
13 and farm hubs (Rotenberk, 2012). The Hanna City farm proposal also aligns with larger state goals under the Food, Farms and Jobs Act to source at least 20 percent of food locally by 2020.
II. RESTORATIVE JUSTICE
RESTORATIVE JUSTICE MOVEMENT
Restorative justice, or “RJ,” is a social movement and set of practices that centers a reparative approach to crime. Restorative justice programs are implemented as a tool that diverts people away from the criminal justice system and directs them towards constructive methods of conflict resolution. Applications of RJ are also used to reduce the shame surrounding crime and incarceration, and reintegrate justice-involved individuals into their communities.
The movement towards alternatives to incarceration like RJ have grown as a critical response to the cynicism directed at the state’s capacity to solve crime
(Braithwaite, 2001). Restorative justice is a young field and only emerged in the
United States in the 1970s at a time when incarceration increased to an unprecedented level (McCold, 2006). The exploration of alternatives to incarceration was congruent to the struggle for prisoner rights, amplified by the
1971 riots at Attica Correctional Facility that left 43 people dead and the murder of prominent Black Panther member George Jackson in San Quentin State Prison.
Prisoners in Attica had demanded fair visitation rights, improved sanitation standards and an end to abuse by corrections officers.
14 In the United States, the earliest RJ programs, beginning in the 1970s, were small, typically grant-funded experimental diversion programs. One of the earliest programs born of this era was the Institute for Meditation and Conflict Resolution
(IMCR). IMCR set the standard for RJ practice, providing training and mediation for interpersonal and community conflicts in New York City (McGillis, 1997).
Particularly important during this time was IMCR’s programs that provided conflict mediation to communities of color experiencing institutional racism (McCold,
2016). In 1978, the U.S. Department of Justice funded three experimental
Neighborhood Justice Centers (NJC) for conflict resolution in Atlanta, Kansas City and Los Angeles. The program was so successful at diverting low-level cases from court that a final evaluation report recommended an expansion of the initiative with development of research, workshops offered to criminal justice officials and the creation of a national program (Cook, Roehl, and Sheppard, 1980).
THEORY OF RESTORATIVE JUSTICE
RJ is distinguished from two other approaches to criminal justice: retributive and distributive, both of which center on the criminal act rather than allow for victim or offender participation (Eglash, 1977). Restorative justice promotes alternatives to incarceration through mediation as a practice of repairing the harm of the criminal justice system on poor communities.
The most commonly used approaches in restorative justice are family group conferencing, circles, and victim-offender mediation. Particularly, restorative justice has been used as a framework for conflict resolution which understands crime and violence as systemic issues through accountability and mediation. Restorative justice scholar Tony F. Marshall described the practice as “a process whereby all
15 the parties with a stake in a particular [offense] come together to resolve collectively how to deal with the aftermath of the [offense] and its implications for the future” (1996, 16). RJ typically uses conflict resolution and mediation between victim, offender and community. The theory of restorative justice reconceptualizes crime as a conflict between members of a community rather than an offense against the state (Christie, 1977).
KEY CONCEPTS
While the practice of restorative justice varies widely, the approach is guided by several core principles and beliefs. These include the importance of engaging multiple parties involved in the crime – victims, offenders, the community; emphasis on mending relationships over punitive stigmatization; and non-hierarchal structures of engagement and citizen participation (Hopkins, 2015; Miller, 2008;
Zehr & Gohar, 2003).
RESTORATIVE JUSTICE IN PLANNING
As a discipline, urban planning has yet to fully embrace issues of policing and incarceration as areas of concern. Progressive advocacy movements like Planners
Network were established to develop alternatives to conventional planning and its inability to address issues of race and poverty (Hartman, 1994). The resistance to include prisons in professionalized planning can be attributed to “issues of academic territory,” but safety and criminal justice touches most aspects of urban life (Lugalia-Hollon, 2015, 64). Some have suggested that these issues are well within the purview of planners because prisons and police systems require significant expenditures from municipal and state governments (Simpson, 2015).
Others suggest that professional planning is far more focused on small-scale
16 intervention and livability than challenging deep inequalities (Stein, 2015). This is evident in planning’s largest membership organization, the American Planning
Association (APA), and the Association’s failure to elevate conversations that focus on criminal justice reform and incarceration (Lowe, 2015).
In Oakland, California, a design and planning firm, Designing Justice + Designing
Spaces (DJDS), is thinking about how to address the harm of prison system using infrastructure. DJDS is dedicated to creating architecture that supports decarceration in way that addresses the root causes of imprisonment (Anzilotti,
2016). This has manifested in several different initiatives, one of which is the development of restorative justice centers including the Near Westside
Peacemaking Center in Syracuse and Restore Oakland in DJDS’ hometown. These structures serve as community centers, collaborative meeting spaces and centers of conflict resolution, as well as provide workforce development and assistance applying for housing (Holder, 2019).
EQUITY PLANNING
Redistributive models of planning prioritize programs and policies that allocate resources to underrepresented communities. This model is known as an “equity planning.” The framework of equity planning was adopted by economic development and land use professionals in the 1970s during an era of urban divestment (Metzger, 1996). Equity planning is principled on a shift from technocratic development to one that prioritizes values, reorienting the planner as advocate for working class and poor communities (Davidoff, 1962). In practice, these principles are typically implemented through policies that improve
17 opportunities for education, access to labor and development of affordable housing (Krumholz, 1991).
In many instances the sole redistribution of resources is insufficient. In order for equity planning processes to meet the needs of the marginalized, political power and positions of decision-making need to be allocated to underrepresented groups
(Altshuler, 1970). Community-controlled planning and practice is intended to not only meet the needs of a community, but to increase the community’s capacity for planning (Kennedy, 2018). Others, such as Dolores Hayden, have noted how concepts in “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning” delink advocacy from land use by ignoring physical planning (1994).
ABOLITION PLANNING
Abolition planning refers to the movement to dismantle the prison-industrial complex as a means of harm reduction. The anti-prison movement is rooted in an ideological belief that incarceration creates more harm than does good and the resources allocated to these institutions should be used to repair the damage they’ve created. In Are Prisons Obsolete? Angela Y. Davis notes that an abolitionist approach to decarceration “require[s] us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society” (Davis, 2003). In other words, prison abolition is involved in “a tradition of stating the impossible” (Samuels and
Stein, 2008, 31).
Tactical approaches to abolition vary widely. Calling for the end of forced and unpaid labor, ending of solitary confinement, and elimination of bail bonds for low-
18 level crimes are all considered part of the abolitionist workbook. While these approaches share tactics of incrementalism, both the goals and the process of abolition planning are defined in anti-prison work (Samuels and Stein, 2008). As
Davis notes:
…we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment – demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance (2003, 44).
These alternatives have been extended to other realms of professional practice.
The UCLA Abolitionist Planning Group applies these principles to not only the prison-industrial complex, but to “all systems that promote racial and social exclusion” (UCLA Abolitionist Planning Group, 4). The abolition planning framework indicates that an anti-prison mass movement, akin to the civil rights movement, is necessary to confront the carceral system.
This movement must be led and involve the participation of low income and working-class communities most directly impacted by mass incarceration (Sudbury,
2015). These sentiments echo community-based theory which emphasizes the importance of citizen knowledge of planning tools and language, as well as the capacity to respond (Davidoff, 1965). This changes the position of the municipal or community planner to an advocate, rather than the redistributor of planning powers. This form of planning requires a rethinking of relationships between citizens and administrations, and their prescriptive roles (King, Feltey and Susel,
1998). This transference of power from a complacent to a redistributive model results in a citizen control, where communities not only participate but are in control of governance of institutions.
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1.6 SUMMARY
The redevelopment of Rikers needs to consider a spectrum of components for the outcome to be driven by thoughtful and participatory processes. Provided literature on the community impacts of incarceration, redevelopment needs to consider the manifold ways urban policy and law has shaped divested communities.
Research regarding practices and precedents for reuse of these facilities and land provide templates for addressing memory in the redevelopment of sites formerly used as detention centers. The restorative justice movement supplies a spectrum of processes and procedures to consider what the criminal justice system could look like if we were to adopt a more humane approach to conflict resolution. These concepts will all prove vital to any reimagining of Rikers Island and a rethinking of current criminal justice practices.
20 CHAPTER TWO: RIKERS ISLAND
The legacy and conditions of Rikers Island are critical to understanding the political activism which propelled the movement to close it.
2.1 HISTORY OF RIKERS ISLAND
The origins of Rikers Island tell the story of New York City’s attempt to reform its jail system. It also tells of a system that left an unbroken linkage between slavery and mass incarceration that disproportionately impacts people of color. By and large the creation of Rikers is best characterized by forced convict labor and environmental injustice, continually serving as “repositories for the lowest tiers of the racialized working class” (Shanahan & Mooney, 2018, 11). The violence, crumbling facilities and inhumane conditions of 19th century detention facilities mirror the current public outcry for Rikers to be closed.
The island was named after Dutch colonizer Abraham Rycken of the Rycken clan, a wealthy Dutch family who settled the island in the 1660s (Surico, 2016). During the
1800s, Abraham’s descendent, Richard Riker, served as a municipal officer for the
City’s criminal court and was notorious for abusing the Fugitive Slave Act by enabling the kidnapping of free Black people in New York and selling them into slavery in the South without trial (Mock, 2015; Surico, 2016). Riker would receive handsome kickbacks from kidnappers for facilitating the theft and sale of these
“fugitive slaves” (Mock, 2015). The Island was purchased by the city in 1884, several decades after Rikers death, for $180,000, splitting the cost with Queens
County, then unincorporated into New York City (Lovejoy, 2015). In an attempt to
21 unburden the unsanitary and decrepit jails on Blackwell’s Island, now known as
Roosevelt Island, the City hoped to create new, more humane detention facilities and relocate inmates to the Rikers Island Penitentiary. Much like the current plans to create borough-based jails, the creation of Rikers Island was based on progressive penal reform ideology that would give birth to “the most modern and up-to-date prison in the United States” (Stokes, 1926, 44).
At the time of its purchase, Rikers was a low-lying 90-acre sliver of land, expanded over the next several decades into 440 acres using prison labor and landfill. Lacking a unified sanitation system, New York City developed a tradition of dumping refuse into local waterways. The city saw the development of Rikers as an opportunity to utilize its garbage and build the island out with unpaid labor. Beginning in the late
1890s the city began to dump its refuse onto the island. The practice of dumping was so pervasive that residents in neighboring Queens and the Bronx began to protest the odors stemming from the Island (Lovejoy, 2015). Conditions were brutal for prisoners, consisting largely of recent migrants and African-Americans, who worked tirelessly under gunpoint in unsanitary conditions. Workers “sifted through the garbage by hand, separating out rotting organic material from dry garbage and ash” (Shanahan & Mooney, 2018, 5). Prisoners were also responsible for building infrastructure necessary to barge in rock and soil excavated from the city’s
Lexington Avenue subway line (Shanahan & Norton, 2017; Shanahan & Mooney,
2018). Once Rikers was connected to the Croton water system in 1903, the island served as an ad hoc detainment facility even though the first penitentiary did not officially open until 1935. Additional jails were built on the island over the next 30 years to match the growing spikes in incarceration.
22
A tractor dumps trash on Rikers Island, ca. 1937 Municipal Archives Collection, NYC Department of Records
Rikers was marred by over-crowding and abuse almost immediately. By 1960, city jails were operating at 50 percent over capacity (Porter, 1960). The daily population of Rikers surged during the 1970s era of Rockefeller drug laws which increased crackdowns on low-level crimes and drug misdemeanors. In addition to the war on drugs, “deinstitutionalization” of inpatient psychiatric hospitals significantly contributed to the growth in Rikers’ population, serving as a de facto dumping ground for those requiring mental health resources (MacDonald et al.,
2015).
23 In the 1990s Mayor Rudy Giuliani adopted a style of policing commonly referred to as “broken windows” that targeted low-level offenses. In an effort to clean New
York’s streets, and “crack down on crime,” hundreds of thousands of largely low- income people of color were incarcerated under NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton
(Surico, 2016). At the height of the crack epidemic and Giuliani’s reign, Rikers population surged to between 21,000 and 24,000 daily inmates (Buser, 2015;
Gonzales, 2019; Haag, 2019). During this time violence spiraled between inmates and at the hands of corrections officers. The facilities became repositories for individuals suffering from mental health crises and was only further exacerbated when the Giuliani administration chose to cut costs for correctional healthcare in
1998 (Surico, 2016).
CURRENT CONDITIONS
As it currently stands, Rikers consists of nine functioning jails that can accommodate up to 15,000 inmates and currently holds a daily average around
7,000. In 2018, Rikers had an average daily population of approximately 9,000 people, the lowest number in 37 years (New York City Comptroller’s Office, 2019).
55 percent of inmates on Rikers Island are Black, 34 percent are Hispanic and 93 percent of all inmates are male (Lippman, et al., 2017). A quarter of inmates are between the ages of 16 and 24 (Lowenstein, 2017).
24
Racial and ethnic makeup of Rikers inmates, A More Just New York City Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, 2017
In terms of political and land use boundaries, Rikers is in Community Board 1 in
Queens and the 22nd City Council district, currently held by Costa Constantinides.
While it has typically been considered part of the Bronx, any land use changes to the island would be within the Queens Councilmember’s jurisdiction. Rikers Island is a single tax and zoning lot and is currently zoned C8-2, in which jails are a permitted use (Group 8D), and has a Floor Area Ratio (FAR) of 2.0.
Three quarters of the New York City jail population awaiting trial, but have not been convicted of a crime and are almost entirely because those individuals cannot make bail. The remaining inmates consist of people convicted of an offense, with more than two thirds serving sentences of 30 days or less. Six percent of the population are locked up for violating parole and are awaiting a hearing. Kalief
Browder, whose case became a flashpoint for criminal justice reform in New York, was held for three years in Rikers after being unable to make bail. Falsely accused of stealing a backpack in 2010, 16-year old Browder spent two of his three
25 incarcerated years in solitary confinement before taking his own life in 2015. The death of Layleen Polanco, a 27-year old Black trans woman held in Rikers on a $500 bail, reignited the public criticism of pretrial detention in 2019.
Despite a steady decline in New York’s overall jail population, the cost to incarcerate has continued to rise. In December of 2019 New York’s Comptroller,
Scott Stringer, released a report that the Department of Corrections (DOC) spends over $337,000 per detainee annually, the highest level ever recorded for the City
(Chapman, 2019). DOC’s budget now exceeds $1.3 billion, 80 percent of which is spent on operations and personnel for Rikers (Elstein, Anuta & Goldensohn, 2016).
One of Rikers’ biggest spatial and logistical problems is its isolation. It is far from city courthouses, neighborhoods and is difficult to access. The Commission approximated that nearly 10 percent of the jail population, approximately 1,000 people were transported off the island for appointments and court appearances daily. The Lippman Commission highlighted this as an imperative to closing Rikers:
The Department of Correction spends $31 million annually transporting defendants back and forth to courthouses and appointments off the Island. Visiting a loved one on Rikers can take an entire day, forcing people to miss work and make costly arrangements for child care. Rikers’s inaccessibility also presents challenges for the men and women who work there. The Commission heard from correction officers who slept in their cars between shifts rather than travel home to be with their families. Perhaps most importantly, Rikers’s isolation encourages an “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” dynamic, to the detriment of all parties (14).
Rikers’ most protuberant reputation is as a violent, abusive and chaotic institution perpetuated by its corrections officers. A 2008 investigative piece in the Village
Voice revealed that officers routinely encouraged inmates to fight one another, often resulting in sustained injuries (Rayman, 2008). In 2014 U.S. Attorney for the
26 Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, released an explosive report detailing a culture of cruelty and abuse at Rikers. The federal government sued the
City after it released findings that New York City DOC displayed a “systemic pattern of excessive force” against teenage inmates (Weiser, Schwirtz, and
Winerip, 2014). The class-action lawsuit, Nunez v. City of New York, called for an overhaul of DOC due to the culture of unrestrained use of solitary confinement as punishment and an administrative blind eye towards assaults by guards on inmates.
Environmental conditions have also negatively impacted air quality and safety on
Rikers. The landfill used to expand the island emits methane gas and because the facilities are built on a landfill the ground underneath is relatively unstable (Rakia,
2016). Rikers is surrounded by other noxious facilities on the South Bronx and
Queens waterfronts including numerous power plants and waste transfer stations.
This includes the Ravenswood Generating Station in Queens and in Port Morris, a neighborhood already disproportionately burdened with noxious facilities. In the early 2000s, the New York Power Authority installed numerous gas-fired turbines in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn. Until the creation of a power plant on the island itself, Rikers had long drawn energy from Queens’ power grid which led to numerous blackouts.
2.2 BOROUGH-BASED JAILS
The recent movement to close Rikers island was conceived as part of a larger political agenda by a coalition of organizers and activists aimed at criminal justice reform. Their platform included ending racially-biased police tactics, decriminalizing marijuana, and abolishing punitive practices like solitary
27 confinement in detention centers. Bharara’s report, and subsequently Browder’s death, thrust the imperative to close Rikers to the front of the agenda. In 2016, the coalition of more than 60 organizations launched the #CLOSErikers campaign on the steps of City Hall, where only two months earlier Council Speaker Mark-Viverito announced the formation of the independent commission to explore closing Rikers.
One year later Mayor Bill de Blasio publicly announced his administration’s pledge to close the facility, based on recommendations of the Lippman Commission.
The Lippman Commission’s report recommended the creation of smaller localized jails that would decrease time and expenses for visiting, as well as provide better proximity to borough court houses. The Commission also called for a population reduction to 5,500 inmates (about half of the current city jail population) and the development of smaller, vertical jails in all five boroughs. The size of each facility would be determined based on the expected inmate population from the borough, with Manhattan’s the largest and Staten Island’s the smallest.
By June 2017, several months after the release of the Commission’s report, Mayor de Blasio’s Administration released Smaller, Safer, Fairer: A Roadmap to Closing
Rikers Island. It was not until early 2018 that de Blasio reached an agreement with
City Council to build four new “community-based facilities,” one in every borough, except Staten Island, which was exempt based on the low number of residents incarcerated from that borough. The mayor’s goal was to reduce the city jail population to 7,000 inmates by 2022 and 5,000 by 2026. Three of the four sites would be expansions of existing facilities: the Manhattan Detention Center (known as “the Tombs”) near City Hall, the Brooklyn Detention Center in Boreum Hill and the Queens Detention Center in Kew Gardens. The plan would also create a new
28 facility in the South Bronx on a former NYPD Tow Pound. De Blasio also announced that all four sites would go through the city’s public review process, the Uniform
Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), as a single application (Office of the Mayor,
2018). The de Blasio administration committed $8.7 billion over ten years for the four borough-based jails in the 2019 capital budget (Khurshid, 2019).
Opposition to the borough-based jails plan has come most loudly from a coalition of prisons abolitionists who have joined under the banner No New Jails. No New
Jails and other prison abolition groups gained ground by pushing the conversation further to the left, resulting in the proposed beds for new facilitates diminished further. Other neighborhood coalitions challenged the proposal based on location and height of new jails. Every community board with a jail proposed for its district rejected the plans, “citing a slew of concerns including with the proposed locations, the overall review process, and what they see as a lack of community engagement” (Spivack, 2019b).
All four jails proceeded as one ULURP but included no provision for the closure of
Rikers and no land uses changes to the island itself. This left the future of Rikers undetermined and at risk of languishing. It was only until a week before the passing of the borough-based jails plan that the City Council approved a second ULURP that would prohibit incarceration on the island after the year 2026 (Brand &
McGoldrick, 2019).
On October 17, 2019, after months of contentious debate on the future of incarceration in New York, the plan to build four new borough-based jails was passed by the City Council. As part of the plan, the city committed $391 million in funding for community-based interventions that are intended to address the root
29 causes of mass incarceration. The earmarked money will go towards community services, housing and restorative justice programs, to be distributed over the next three years (Spivack and Plitt, 2019).
2.3 REDEVELOPMENT PROPOSALS
There are currently several redevelopment concepts for Rikers Island put forward by the Lippman Commission, as well as elected officials and design firms. They range in function from recreational and industrial to residential and commercial.
RENEWABLE RIKERS
Multiple proposals to convert the island into a hub for renewable energy has gained momentum through support of City Council, congressional superstar
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Regional Plan Association (RPA). The proposal with the most traction is a trio of bills titled the Renewable Rikers Act, introduced by Queens Councilmember Costa Constantinides, which would transfer ownership of Rikers Island from the DOC to the Department of Environmental Protection
(DEP) and divert wastewater treatment facilities from overburdened communities to the island (Cullen, 2019). The proposal envisions 100 acres of the island to be converted to a solar energy farm and battery storage (Spivack, 2019a).
The state and the city have set ambitious goals to shift to renewable energy and the Renewable Rikers Plan provides an opportunity to unburden environmental justice communities, many of which are the same communities with the highest incarceration rates in the city. Specifically, power plants and wastewater treatment plants in Queensbridge, East Bronx and other environmental justice communities
30 could be eliminated through the implementation of renewable energy facilities on the island (Constantinides & Bratspies, 2019). The RPA expects that the removal of noxious facilities from these neighborhoods could open up more than 12 miles of waterfront access back to the public, as well as make significant contributions to making a dent in the City’s Zero Waste goals (Spivack, 2019a).
The Renewable Rikers Act was built off of recommendations and a conceptual master plan devised by the Lippman Commission for the future use of Rikers. The
Commission provided two concepts for the reuse of the island. The second of the two concepts (Concept 2) includes a number of renewable energy facilities, as well as an academic and research center dedicated to the study and development of alternative energy production. The concept supports a 25-acre composting facility would process 1,000 tons of organic material daily, a 40-acre energy-from-waste facility that could process 2,000 tons of waste daily, a 115-acre solar field, 18 acres of power storage and a 13-acre urban farm. Additionally, the island would include a public greenway with bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure and a memorial.
31
Rendering of Concept 2, A More Just New York City Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, 2017
EXPANSION OF LAGUARDIA AIRPORT
The first concept outlined by the Commission (Concept 1) proposes a new runway and terminal for LaGuardia Airport, as well as supportive, but diminished, renewable energy facilities mentioned in the previous section. According to the report, the creation of a third runway would expand flight capacity by 40 percent and a new 1.5 million square foot terminal could accommodate 12 million additional passengers (Lippman, et al., 2017). The concept also proposes an
AirTrain extension that would connect the new facility with existing terminals, commuter rail and subway lines.
Concept 1 is framed as a superior economic development strategy with the estimated creation of up to 52,000 new jobs at the new terminal and runway. The report claims that the expanded airport “could generate up to $7.5 billion in total annual economic activity, including up to $4.3 billion from airport operations and
32 employee spending, and up to $3.2 billion generated through new visitor spending and spin-off effects” (Lippman, et al., 2017). The report estimates that Concept 2, the proposal without an airport expansion, would generate $340 million in annual economic activity and 1,500 jobs.
Total projected project benefits, A More Just New York City Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, 2017
With a reputation as a “third world airport” ranked worst in the country due to poor service, endless construction and delays, LaGuardia is due for an upgrade
(Schladebeck, 2017). According to planning firm ReThinkNYC, the annexing of the island would be part of a larger plan to convert Rikers to a transit hub, linking a new underground monorail to the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North in the
Bronx (Cohen, 2016).
33 However, the proposal to expand LaGuardia has gained the skepticism of policy experts and politicians. The Green New Deal, as well as recent research by the
United Nations and International Council on Clean Transportation, has elevated concern about the impact airplane emissions have on the environment. One policy brief reported that aviation could account for up to a quarter of all carbon emissions by 2050 (Pidcock and Yeo, 2016).
Rendering of an extension of LaGuardia Airport ReThinkNYC, 2016
Queens congressional representative Joe Crowley and the RPA’s president, Tom
Wright, have both urged the City not to use Rikers as a new runway due to already congested airspace, increasing noise impacts on neighboring communities and the lost opportunity to relieve strain on the city’s energy systems by not implementing a variation of the Renewable Rikers plan (Crain’s, 2017).
34
HOUSING
Given the ongoing New York City affordability crisis, housing has also been proposed for Rikers Island, despite the logistical challenges of redevelopment for residential uses. The Lippman Commission, as well as a handful of developers and design firms, have studied the feasibility of housing, but it has not gained traction because of the extreme isolation and environmental conditions of the island. One architecture firm, Curtis + Ginsberg, proposed a large-scale, new, affordable housing development that would include up to 25,000 new apartments. A large park on the island’s southern edge would serve as a buffer from noise created by
LaGuardia (Cohen, 2016). Similar challenges were faced during the redevelopment planning of Roosevelt Island in late 1960, remedied by large-scale transit investments in the form of a new subway station and commuter tramway. If “Rikers were developed with the same density as Roosevelt, it could be home to more than 33,000 residents” and therefore require major transit improvements (Haag,
2019). Provided the limited access by bridge to the island and a nearly 30-minute walk to the closest subway station, the City would need to invest significant funds into infrastructure to support a residential community.
Rikers’ proximity to LaGuardia Airport is also a significant challenge due to direct overhead flight paths which elevate noise levels and impose maximum height limits for any development to 145 to 150 feet. Because of this, the viability for housing, healthcare and recreation are significantly reduced (Lippman, et al., 2017). Noise generated by the airport also makes residential and institutional activity not ideal.
35 OTHER PROPOSALS
Following the then-Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito’s call for the closing of Rikers in
2016, several other concepts that consider future uses of Rikers emerged, varying in political and physical feasibility.
• Design and planning firm WXY envisioned “LaGuardia Yards,” a
manufacturing hub that could support hundreds of new industrial
businesses. Unlike most residential and commercial uses, overhead noise
and height limits would not limit activity for manufacturing businesses
(Elstein, et al. 2016). The plan would most likely require additional bridges
for truck traffic.
• “Bikers Island,” a proposal put forth by Perkins + Will, envisions Rikers with
multiple facilities including a bicycle manufacturing center “to train and
employ former inmates,” a velodrome, and bike paths throughout the island
(Cohen, 2016).
• Magnusson Architecture and Planning’s “Everything Island” (includes a
multitude of uses from urban agriculture and parks to high density
residential. The island would be connected to Queens by the proposed
Brooklyn-Queens Connector (BQX) and a foot bridge to Hunts Point (Cohen,
2016).
DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGES
The Commission identified several opportunities and challenges to redevelopment.
At 440 acres sandwiched between two boroughs, the Island’s size and location
36 allow for multiple different uses on the site. The majority of Riker’s Island is outside the 100-year and 500-year flood plains due to its elevation, indicating it could support new facilities without substantial risk of inundation.
As mentioned, transportation and accessibility are key limiting factors for redevelopment. Currently, the mile-long Francis R. Buono Bridge, initially deemed
“The Bridge of Hope” by former Corrections Commissioner Anna M. Kross, is the only way to the access Rikers (Shanahan and Norton, 2017). Connecting Rikers to
Astoria, Queens, the bridge has three lanes with access controlled by the
Department of Correction and is only served by one public bus route, the Q100.
The Commission notes that “the most suitable future use of the Island would benefit from the Island’s relative isolation rather than try to overcome it” (Lippman, et al., 2017). It is worth noting, however, that the current New York City ferry network has neighboring stops in Astoria and Soundview in the Bronx. A ferry company executive was quoted as saying that a stop could be added at Rikers for less than $10 million (Elstein, et al. 2016).
Environmental conditions also pose serious challenges because of significant remediation needed. Because Rikers is built on landfill, redevelopment costs will be atypically high due to the unstable and contaminated condition of the land. The
Commission identified several barriers these conditions create for redevelopment:
Deep bedrock, weak soil, and methane deposits resulting from the history of fill on the Island will require construction methods that increase building costs, especially for people intensive uses such as residential, office, or retail development, and especially in the eastern portion of the Island, where the fill is newer and has not fully settled. Demolition of jail facilities, due to likely asbestos and lead contamination in older buildings and construction techniques, will be costlier and
37 take longer than in typical circumstances. Feasible uses must be able to offset these extraordinary costs with tangible public benefits (105).
As conversation regarding the development of Rikers has become more public- facing, it has grown clear that development must occur within the constraints of the island. Mayor Bill de Blasio recently stated that residential and commercial development on Rikers would not happen, largely because of these conditions
(Small, 2019). Public ownership of the land also reduces any possibility for development that serves private interests without immense public pushback or benefit.
Height limitations due to proximity to LaGuardia Airport, A More Just New York City Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, 2017
STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT
38 Identifying and engaging stakeholders is an important first step in the redevelopment of the island. A feasibility study led by HR&A Advisors developed conceptual plans for the Island’s redevelopment, analyzed costs and benefits, conducted stakeholder engagement, and led design workshops (Lippman, et al.,
2017). The report identified the wider New York City population as stakeholders in the redevelopment of Rikers:
The general New York City population, nearby residents, Rikers detainees, their families and communities, various governmental entities, and many other private and public actors all have a stake in the future of the Island. Developing a viable reuse plan for land of this size, with the unique restrictions and complications of Rikers, requires community buy-in, industry expertise, and public sector leadership (101).
It is not simple to identify local stakeholders in the case of Rikers. When determining who is impacted, the jail has both spatial and social impacts. Buy-in from stakeholders is essential for moving any project forward and it is clear that any development that occurs on Rikers must respect its legacy as well as create a grandiose gesture.
2.4 SUMMARY
The legacy of Rikers as a repository for the city’s poorest and its severe environmental conditions provide a unique and challenging opportunity for redevelopment. It is clear that the physical constraints of the island, in terms of accessibility, structural integrity, and its proximity to existing noxious uses, make many uses unfeasible. However, the sheer size and central location of Rikers present a once-in-a-lifetime chance to expand and consolidate major infrastructure.
It is also evident that any major changes of use on Rikers must heed the
39 recommendations of the Lippman Commission and consider brutal legacy left behind, extending from the kidnapping and sale of Black New Yorkers by the island’s former owner, Richard Riker, to the routine assaults at the hands of guards on the general population.
40 CHAPTER THREE: STAKEHOLDER EVALUATION AND BEST
PRACTICES
Chapter Three explores how the redevelopment of Rikers Island can be carried out using a restorative justice framework. This chapter builds on the framework for restorative justice and decarceration established in Chapter One, as well as a context for the legacy and reimagining of Rikers established in Chapter Two. To best understand how the redevelopment of Rikers can be informed by principles of decarceration and restorative justice, interviews were conducted with leading members of community organizations, policy-makers and formerly incarcerated individuals. Key findings and themes from interviews are supported by “best practices” from regional redevelopment projects on post-carceral land.
3.1 INTERVIEW PROCEDURES
A series of questions (shown in the Appendix) asked interviewees about their involvement with the closure of Rikers, how they envision the Island’s future and what processes and criteria should be implemented in determining its repurposing.
The purpose of this series of questions is to gain an understanding of both a realistic framework in which development occurs and also to glean attitudes and ideologies concerning how land and capital should be appropriated to further decarceration and principles of equity. About half of the interviewees have direct experience either working on or being incarcerated at Rikers. Interview questions also asked participants about current proposals for redevelopment outlined in
Chapter Two, primarily Concept 1 and Concept 2 from A More Just New York City.
Lastly, questions probed who should be involved in the planning process and what
41 communities have been most impacted by Rikers to better understand stakeholder engagement for redevelopment.
3.2 STAKEHOLDER DETAILS
Interviewees were divided into two categories: policy and organizing. Policy interviewees were selected based on their expertise and knowledge of the political, financial and planning dimensions of Rikers Island and its potential for redevelopment. Organizers provided front line knowledge of the criminal justice system, its impact of individuals and the goals of decarceration for justice-involved communities. Both sets of interviewees were asked the same questions.
Stakeholders interviewed are by no means a representative sample of the community impacted by Rikers Island, but they do provide valuable insight as those who have engaged with the criminal justice system, policy and planning processes, and organizing around the closure of Rikers. The following individuals were interviewed:
Policy
• David Burney, City Planning Commission • Nick Widzowski, Office of Councilmember Costa Constantinides • Jordan Stockdale, Close Rikers - NYC Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice • Moses Gates, Regional Plan Association • Cecil Corbin-Mark, WEACT
Community Organizing
• Sarita Daftary-Steel, Just Leadership • Raymond Figueroa, Friends of Brook Park • Justin Roberts, Rikers Debate Project • Harvey Murphy, Just Leadership
42 • Kandra Clark, Exodus Transitional Community • Roger Headley, VOCAL-NY • Nabil Hassein, No New Jails • Erika Sussman, Center for Court Innovation • Steven Pacheco, Vera Institute
3.3 KEY FINDINGS
Key themes from stakeholder interviews emerged based on several categories of questions including speculation on future uses, stakeholder engagement and the applicability of restorative justice as a process. Questions were framed to understand if the redevelopment of Rikers was an opportunity to foster restorative justice and if the island itself could serve as form of remediation towards the harm inflicted by incarceration.
USES
A consensus among interviewees about uses clearly discourages two baseline factors: 1) the development of Rikers as a private venture and 2) control of the island by DOC. Interviewees were also skeptical of institutions like the New York
City’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) to lead a bidding and construction process for the island. Primarily, stakeholders recommended to have some type of public purpose, whether it be a park, memorial or another type of accessible feature. Most interviewees agreed that the isolation and accessibility of the island was not going to change, and that it could perhaps work to the advantage of future proposed uses. Rikers will never be a “place you drop by” stated Moses Gates, Vice President of Neighborhood Planning for the RPA, “the appropriate use is something where you can get to it if you’re supposed to go there, like a job, school or special event.”
43
Housing was considered an unfeasible use across the board. This was unsurprising given Rikers’ extreme environmental conditions, including underground toxins and overhead noise from the airport, the limited accessibility and the complex legacy of the land.
A significant portion of interviewees involved in policy and organizing advocated for a version of Councilmember Constantinides’ “Renewable Rikers” Plan because of its isolation, the ability to transition to renewables and the possibility to facilitating restorative justice in neighborhoods by removing existing harmful facilities. Raymond Figueroa, a Taconic Faculty Fellow at the Pratt Center who leads a gardening diversion program for youth recommended the Island be redeveloped as a community land trust (CLT) that stewards state-of-the art environmental workforce development for formerly incarcerated and otherwise criminal justice-involved individuals. Figueroa termed this “Del Pueblo
Environmental, Sustainability and Resiliency Institute.” The CLT would serve as a workforce pipeline for the new green economy with curriculum focused on regenerative economic development of historically marginalized communities. The island would become a campus that provides marginalized communities the opportunity to reclaim and repurpose former prison facilities, dedicate the land to urban agriculture, waste management practices, and renewable energy production.
Flexibility of uses also was viewed as important and the reason most interviewees do not support the idea to expand LaGuardia’s runways. Since the island is so large, most agreed it can host a wide variety of facilities.
44 RESTORATIVE JUSTICE
The primary purpose of stakeholder interviews was to understand how restorative justice can be, or is, incorporated into the plan for Riker’s redevelopment. This is not a simple feat, since restorative justice takes on many meanings and some, as those from the Mayor’s office, consider the closing of Rikers itself an act of restorative justice. One of the primary questions used to engage stakeholders on these issues is as follows:
Restorative justice is a process that holds offending parties accountable using participatory, non-hierarchal, engagement that emphasizes community empowerment. In the case of Rikers Island, the offending party is the state. This thesis suggests that allowing impacted communities to lead the process of redevelopment is a form of restorative justice – does this application of RJ align with your understanding of the practice?
This question opens up a series of other questions regarding where and how RJ happens: does it happen in neighborhoods? How can the benefits of redevelopment be linked to justice-involved communities? Which neighborhoods require significant investment? Structural denial to economically productive resources is one of the key issues facing many of these communities. Whether in the form of redlining, “broken windows” or “zero-tolerance” policing, divested schools or the numerous barriers to employment, housing and stability that formerly incarcerated people face, addressing core neighborhood issues is central to this query.
As mentioned, the Renewable Rikers Plan resonated with many interviewees because of its potential to open up space in environmental justice communities, which are frequently the same communities with high rates of incarceration. One of the biggest opportunities that could arise from momentum behind a renewables
45 plan is a one-to-one replacement of power plants and wastewater treatment plants in neighboring Queens and the Bronx. If a Renewable Rikers plan was able to replace significant power plants and wastewater treatment facilities using clean technology then a commitment to close noxious facilities could be part of the plan’s commitments.
PROCESS
As with any major planning project, community input is an essential part of the process for redeveloping Rikers. There are discrepancies among who the
“community” is in this scenario. For an institution that has had such a significant impact on some many people, from incarcerated individuals and their families, neighboring communities, as well as people who work on the island, there is not a clear definition of community. Some interviewees identified specific neighborhoods that have been disproportionately impacted by Rikers as those who should have a significant stake in the future of the island. These neighborhoods were ones most commonly associated with high levels of incarceration, low-income populations and communities of color. Particularly cited were neighborhoods of Mott Haven,
Melrose, Central Bronx, Hunts Point, Longwood in the Bronx, East and Central
Harlem and Washington Heights in Manhattan, and Bedford-Stuyvesant,
Brownsville, East New York, New Lots, Williamsburg and Bushwick in Brooklyn.
Justin Roberts, a data analyst who leads debate teams on Rikers, made the analogy that you “don’t try to get rid of your nose when you have a cold”:
“The restorative nature wouldn’t actually come from an active, bottom-up community development dynamic or [from] what actually happens on Rikers Island, but it could come from having some kind of return from what is developed there. […] for example, if there is a plant that develops something, making sure that some
46 of the revenue or subsidiary that’s generated from whatever product is coming from [that plant] goes into the communities”
A memorial was cited as an important element to redevelopment, while others were more skeptical that if restorative justice does not occur within impacted neighborhoods than a memorial is nothing more than a platitude. Real commitments to invest in low-income, high-incarceration neighborhoods should serve as the memorial. It is unclear how the City will proceed with redevelopment.
Several interviewees stated that redevelopment must happen simultaneously to the borough-based jail timeline. This would mean that redevelopment should occur on the island while facilities are still being used for incarceration.
MEMORIALS
How Rikers will be remembered is an essential part of the redevelopment effort and requires extraordinary sensitivity and consultation with impacted communities.
However, the project of creating memorials are often fraught and highly political.
History museums and memory projects often serve as a way to tell the official story of a moment in time – yet how can a monument be created to an event that is still unfolding, such as the prison-industrial complex? Moses Gates suggested that the creation of a memorial for Rikers would be akin to the difficult and multi-faceted process of designing a 9/11 memorial to commemorate the events of September
11, 2001. In that scenario there were so many different stakeholders (first responders, victim’s families, neighbors and surrounding businesses, the state and the city) that coming to a unified vision for the site was nearly impossible. There is no single narrative that defines Rikers Island, and its impacts have been as varied as they are deep. Interviewees recognized this complicated question and were largely unprepared to provide a distinct vision for how the island would be memorialized
47 in a traditional sense. Most interviewees were very clear that the memory of Rikers should be embedded in its redevelopment both in communities and on the island itself.
It is important to note that Rikers not only disproportionately punished certain communities, but that those communities led the movement to close the jail.
Jordan Stockdale, the Deputy Director of Close Rikers, noted that a memorial for jail should be “something that demonstrates the power of this movement and why it closed Rikers.” Other interviewees recommended that any type of memorial to those who suffered should be determined through an independent design commission made up of formerly incarcerated individuals. By and large, all interviewees agreed that the investment and commitment to structural change in divested communities would be the true testament to Rikers’ memory.
3.4 BEST PRACTICES
Much can be learned from a handful of important redevelopment projects of former detention centers in New York. These best-in-class examples contribute to information gathered from stakeholder interviews and will better inform final recommendations in Chapter Four. The three precedent cases selected represent three different typologies of redevelopment.
THE ‘WOMEN’S BUILDING’ (New York, NY)
The Bayview Correctional Facility in Manhattan closed in 2012 after it was severely flooded by Superstorm Sandy. Completed in 1931, the building originally served as a Y.M.C.A for merchant sailors docked at the Chelsea Piers. In 1967, the building became a state-run drug treatment center and was converted to a women’s prison
48 several years later. Much like Rikers, Bayview was recognized for exceptionally horrific conditions and rumors of abuse: in 2010, 11.5% of inmates reported sexual assaults by staff, the highest rate in the nation (Beck and Harrison, 2010). Bayview was officially decommissioned in 2013 as a result of damage from Sandy and as part of a mass closing of prisons across the state under New York Governor
Andrew Cuomo. After the facility’s closure, Empire State Development, New York
State’s economic development corporation, issued an RFP for redevelopment. The winning bid went to the NoVo Foundation, a New York-based private foundation, who proposed dedicated working space for women-centric community service and advocacy organizations. The facility would be renamed the Women’s Building and would house organizations committed to gender equality and decarceration.
NoVo understood the sensitivity and impact the building could have as a source of healing and as an opportunity to “reclaim the space” by women impacted by the justice system (Jeltsen, 2017). The Foundation facilitated leadership by establishing an advisory committee comprised of formerly incarcerated women met with NoVo regularly to lead and advise on the building’s redevelopment (Savage, 2016). As part of their role, the advisory committee was responsible for reviewing submissions for the building’s redesign competition and selecting a lead project architect. A critical partnership in the development plan was with the Women and
Justice Project, a nonprofit that works to end mass incarceration and whose leadership is comprised of formerly incarcerated women (Law, 2017). In addition to centering leadership with formerly incarcerated women, NoVo committed to housing and contracting one hundred percent of the project’s bids to minority and women-owned businesses. And to ensure a high proportion of women were hired
49 for the building’s conversion, the Women’s Building committed to have women hired for 35 percent of all construction trade hours.
In October of 2019, after years of planning and organizing, NoVo announced that they would back out of project because of overblown timelines and budgets that
“would be better spent funding organizations that can more quickly and directly help marginalized communities” (Smith, 2019). While the outcome of the project is disappointing, the Women’s Building provides an important model for the sensitivity and inclusive process in redevelopment planning. The voices of people directly impacted by Bayview were not only centered, but given power in determining future uses and visioning of how the facility could be a source of reparation for the damage of incarceration. Altshuler’s principles of equity planning which places decision-making powers in the hands of underrepresented groups is directly applied in this case.
THE PENINSULA (The Bronx, NY)
The Spofford Juvenile Detention Center, sited in the South Bronx since 1957, has long been symbolic of the criminalization of poverty and the failures of the carceral system in New York City. Much like Rikers, the detention center held minors under the age of 15 awaiting trial, 95 percent of whom were Black or Latino (Marty,
2018). Spofford’s neighborhood, Hunts Point, is part of the poorest congressional district in the country and in 2017 had a median household income of $21,366, about 66% less than citywide median household income (Furman Center, 2017). It is a neighborhood characterized by environmental injustice, poverty and divestment, but also once of resilience and perseverance. After numerous broken promises by the city to shut down Spofford, determined community groups began
50 to organize to close the facility once and for all. A decades long campaign that called out chronic claims of supervisorial abuse, unsanitary conditions and episodes of violence in the detention center, finally resulted in Spofford’s doors shutting in
2011.
In March of 2018, the City Council unanimously voted to convert the abandoned structures into a massive community complex, “The Peninsula,” with 740 units of subsidized housing as the centerpiece. The project is now being led by NYC EDC and the Department of Housing and Preservation (HPD), who issued an RFEI for the site in 2015. The final joint proposal from Gilbane Development Company, the
Hudson Companies, and Mutual Housing Association of New York (MHANY) worked with local community-based organizations The Point CDC and Urban
Health Plan to develop services and programming (NYCEDC, 2018). In addition to housing, the project will produce a new plaza, light industrial space with kitchen step-out space for food business entrepreneurs, community facilities with artist workspace and a new supermarket. The development team committed to hiring 30 percent locally through the City’s HireNYC program and give preference to neighborhood residents for 50 percent of all new apartments.
The Peninsula does not preserve any part of Spofford, electing instead to demolish the former structures and build from a clean slate. In a neighborhood facing simultaneous threats of concentrated poverty and gentrification, the Peninsula creates reimagines Spofford as a site of opportunity, enacting restorative justice through intervention in the form of affordable housing, community facilities and skills training. Many interviewees expressed a desire for a similar outcome to
51 Spofford: the act of restorative justice will be in the form of neighborhood investment.
PRISON MEMORY PROJECT (Hudson, NY)
In Hudson, New York, the closing of the Mid-Orange Correctional Facility, part of
New York’s mass closing of state prisons in 2011, resulted in a widespread campaign for community visioning. A citizens’ advisory panel was created, “that interviewed everybody from local merchants to police” to determine the future of the building and land (Applebaum, 2012). During this same year, the Prison
Memory Project began its work conducting oral history interviews with Hudson area residents, formerly incarcerated individuals and local historians to build an archive and conduct public engagement in the form of pop-up museums and educational curriculum.
The organization has now branched out and works with communities across the country to aide in reflection and learning about the role prisons play in communities and their widespread impact on civic life. Prison Memory Project uses a variety of participatory and creative activities to engage citizens from all walks of life on the complicated nature of detention facilities. Programming for targeted populations include those currently incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, youth and seniors and retired correctional staff.
3.5 SUMMARY
The Renewable Rikers Plan, or some iteration of a hub of renewable energy facilities relocated to the island, reframes the need for the island itself to be used
52 as a vehicle of restorative justice. Instead, certain types of uses could be centered on Rikers that alleviate the need for carbon-emitting and environmentally damaging facilities in neighboring communities. This plan has gained overwhelming support from a diverse set of individuals and organizations. The link between environmental justice communities and justice-involved communities is clear, and presents the redevelopment of Rikers as an opportunity to address multiple systemic injustices. Based on issues raised and analysis in Chapter Three, any development that occurs on Rikers must also have clear and evident relationship back to the communities most impacted by incarceration and require direct input and consultation with justice-involved neighborhoods.
53 CHAPTER FOUR: RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONCLUSION
4.1 SUMMARY OF FINDINGS
Since its founding, Rikers has been a place defined by brutality, racism and violence, obscured only by its isolation. Stop-and-frisk tactics and broken windows policing disproportionately impacts New York’s Black and Latinx men, further disrupting destressed communities and families. Many of these men come from the same few neighborhoods in the Bronx, East Harlem, and Central and East
Brooklyn, with supporting data indicating that these neighborhoods suffer from over-incarceration. Many of Rikers’ inmates are incarcerated simply for being too poor to afford bail, tragically illustrated by the death of Kalief Browder. Waiting for a trial on Rikers can take months or years, placing the incarcerated in an impossible situation where they are unable to work, pay rent, care for obligations and stay connected to their community. While the closure of Rikers and the borough-based jails plan faces many challenges ahead, it provides a rare opportunity to address these injustices by developing a participatory and inclusive framework for redevelopment.
Redevelopment of land formerly inhabited by prisons and detainment centers is a process that has few precedents. Best practices in Chapter Three provide important lessons on approaching redevelopment of post-carceral land that utilize principles of restorative justice like community participation, citizen empowerment and non-hierarchal structures, but none are at the scale of Rikers. Other concepts from the literature review in Chapter One highlight intersectional pathways to approaching decarceration by peeling back the numerous ways incarceration is a social determinant of health, revealing the impacts of imprisonment on
54 neighborhoods and exploring of methods of reinvestment in justice-involved communities.
4.2 RECOMMENDATIONS
Recommendations in Chapter Four are based on cumulative research and synthesis of Chapters One through Three. The recommendations are categorized by three major themes of important criteria to the redevelopment of Rikers: how the island will be used, what processes will be put in place to facilitate restorative justice, and how Rikers will be remembered. The recommendations focus both on the redevelopment of the Island, as well as mitigating and repairing the impacts of incarceration on justice-involved communities, with the purpose of advocating of a frequently heard sentiment: “the best way to acknowledge and address the brutal legacy of Rikers is to invest in the well-being of the people and communities that it has most harmed” (Murphy & Ortiz, 2019).
4.2.1 USES
— Support a Renewable Rikers plan
The closing of Rikers presents a once-in-a-lifetime chance to address what is the defining issue of our generation: climate change. Yearly National Climate
Assessment reports have consistently provided evidence that existing inequalities will exacerbate climate impacts on the poor, a concern that local groups such as
South Bronx Unite, UPROSE and El Puente have adopted as core campaign issues.
Marginalized communities that have been disproportionately impacted by police practices of racial profiling, stop-and-frisk, and, subsequently, high rates of incarceration are frequently environmental justice communities, overburdened with noxious facilities and highways. Numerous interviewees framed the Renewable
55 Rikers Plan as a win for environmental justice communities, justice-involved communities and the city at large, with the potential to remove existing power plants from neighborhoods like Hunts Point and Queensbridge. Additionally, there is a critical mass already in support of Renewable Rikers: the plan has endorsements from local environmental justice organizations like The Point CDC,
Environmental Justice Alliance, and New York Lawyers for Public Interest, criminal justice reform institutions like Just Leadership, planning policy advocates such as the Regional Plan Association and congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez.
— Include a 1-to-1 facilities replacement commitment in conjunction with
the Climate Mobilization Act
If the City chooses to advance Renewable Rikers, the plan must include a 1-to-1 replacement standard for noxious facilities in environmental justice communities.
The existing trio of bills, currently under review by City Council, will study the feasibility of the plan and identify powerplants and wastewater treatment facilities that can be closed. Priority will be given to closing “peaker plants,” turbines built by the New York Power Authority (NYPA) for surplus energy during high demand periods, such as summer (Moran, 2019). These plants were installed in 2001 as part of the NYPA’s PowerNow! Project and are fired up when electricity demand is higher than what baseload powerplants can provide, but emit two times the carbon emissions produced by similar fossil-fuel plants (Moran, 2019; Intro 1318, 2019).
There are 16 peaker plants in New York City and they are disproportionately sited in working-class neighborhoods of color such as the South Bronx, Queensbridge, and Sunset Park, as pictured below. Nitrogen oxides produced from these plants
56 are strongly associated with asthma, heart disease and respiratory conditions, all of which are found in higher rates in low-income communities (Intro 1318, 2019).
Peaker power plants and environmental justice areas in Greater New York National Resources Defense Council, 2018
Priority should be given to neighboring environmental justice communities in the
South Bronx and Queensbridge, both of which have peaker plants along the waterfront as well as disproportionately high rates of incarceration.
— Allocate capital funding for remediation and community stewardship of
former noxious facilities as new sites of social services, working
waterfronts and open space
Decommissioned powerplants and treatment facilities are, by and large, on public land. The long overdue negligence of the state to decommission peaker plants and introduce alternative energy measures should be remedied through a provision of
57 funding for remediation and community stewardship of these lands. Once all noxious facilities are removed, these sites should be used for community purposes to support social services, workforce development and open space. After remediation, these sites could host new neighborhood-based transformative justice centers recommended later in this chapter. The waterfront could also host working industries and training facilities to prepare community members for green economy job skills, like those needed to support uses outlined in Renewable Rikers plan.
Lastly, because many of these neighborhoods have not had access to their waterfronts and lack public parks, new open space should be prioritized.
— Develop a robust workforce development and education program dedicated
to training for new green economy skills
Building on the previous recommendation, the new working waterfront would connect community members to decent-paying positions in growing industries that are consistent with the goals of Renewable Rikers. These centers could provide skills training with wrap around services to prepare participants for the workforce with job readiness training and social services. The workforce centers would maintain strong connections to employers in developing fields to ensure training is consistent with employer needs. Workforce development centers should also prioritize a percentage of participants are formerly incarcerated community members and those coming out of the system. This would build on the City’s recent pledge of $19 million for the Jails to Jobs program which connects formerly incarcerated people with workforce training, mentors, and educational subsidies
(Glasser-Baker, 2019). Organizations such as the Fortune Society have already established similar programs such as the Green Building Operation and
Maintenance program and environmental and remediation training. Another
58 example is Per Scholas, a workforce development program that connects people from marginalized communities to information technology training with the goal of greater representation in the tech field.
As part of the Renewable Rikers plan, a training, research and operations hub for renewable energy facilities would be developed on the island. A certain number of jobs would be set aside for formerly incarcerated and low-income New Yorkers for operations, management and research positions in the new facility, with skills training connected to smaller, community-based workforce training centers.
Extended ferry service along the Astoria and Soundview routes would be established to provide better access to Rikers for workers and the public.
4.2.2 MEMORY
— Provide substantial funding and resources from Department of Cultural
Affairs (DCLA) for the Rikers Public Memory Project
For most New Yorkers the island remains out of sight, despite the jail’s daily impact on thousands of families and communities. A large-scale oral history and education project can ensure that the memories of Rikers are centralized and serve as an educational tool about the complex intersection of New York history and incarceration. The Rikers Public Memory Project is a community-based, participatory initiative through which collective stories about the impact of Rikers are activated to envision a more just NYC. The Memory Project is currently supported by States of Incarceration, an organization that provides teaching resources, educational materials and public program designs for engaging communities on the impacts of incarceration. The Rikers Public Memory Project could be expanded through DCLA funding to create permanent facilities in
59 neighborhood restorative justice centers, universities, and schools, and provide robust programming that centers the voices of justice-involved communities and the formerly incarcerated. A successful model of oral history archiving is
StoryCorps, a nation-wide storytelling project which deploys mobile recording booths and educational programming in conjunction with partner organizations.
Organizations like StoryCorps could serve as a model for expanding a project like the Rikers Public Memory Project.
— Support system-wide school curriculum that put laws and policies of
incarceration into historical context
As highlighted in Chapter One, the carceral system perpetuates long-standing divestment from predominantly low-income communities of color. Demystifying the institutions and policies that enable mass incarceration are key to building a movement to end it. This requires support for a system-wide curriculum and materials designed for high school students to better understand the crisis of incarceration, through the lens of discrimination and racial privilege. Curriculum for teaching mass incarceration is already being circulated: after the success of The
New Jim Crow, Teaching Tolerance, an open-source educational resource, designed a course to teach Michelle Alexander’s book to high schoolers. Other local organization like the Center for Urban Pedagogy and El Puente Academy for
Justice and Peace have developed programs for high schoolers to learn how prisons impact a community’s mental and physical health.
Mass incarceration and institutional racism should be adopted as part of New York
City’s Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education (CRSE) policy for high school- aged classes. The CRSE curriculum was passed by the Panel for Educational Policy
60 in 2019 with the goal of affirming student diversity, elevating historically marginalized voices and reimagining how civil rights is taught in schools. In order to better inform a discourse on equity, a system-wide curriculum that puts laws and policies of incarceration into historical context should be supported by the City.
4.2.3 PROCESS
— Develop a city-wide network of neighborhood-based transformative
justice centers
In A More Just New York City, The Lippman Commission estimated that the borough-based jails plan and the closing of Rikers would result in “$540 million in annual budgetary savings” (18). The City should redirect this budgetary surplus, as well as new capital funding, towards the construction and development of new neighborhood-based restorative justice centers. Interviewees in Chapter Three stressed the importance of reinvestment occurring within justice-involved neighborhoods, including the promotion of alternatives to incarceration programs.
These new centers could be modeled after developments like Restore Oakland, mentioned in Chapter One, which serves as a center of conflict resolution, connects community to social services and provides bridge training for livable-wage jobs.
These centers would be led by local alternatives-to-incarceration programs such as the Center for Court Innovation, Common Justice and Good Shepherd Services, providing an opportunity to expand their services. In consultation with the spatial distribution of incarceration rates provided by the Justice Atlas of Sentencing and
Corrections, neighborhoods such as Hunts Point, Central Bronx, Tremont and Port
Morris in the Bronx, East Harlem and Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan, and
Brownsville, East New York and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn would be prioritized for new justice centers (Center for Justice Mapping, 2010). In their 2019
61 report and guide, Close Rikers Now, We Keep Us Safe, abolitionist organization No
New Jails proposed a similar initiative called the “We Keep Us Safe Network.” The network of transformative justice centers would be spaces that constantly evolve to address community needs and provide in house social workers, therapists and mediators to address a number of issues without connection to the criminal justice system (No New Jails, 2019). Restorative justice centers could provide alternatives to incarceration using community-led programming and trainings for violence intervention.
— Form an advisory committee of justice-involved individuals to make key
decisions regarding design and programming of new educational and
research facilities on Rikers
The City should form an advisory committee that engages the formerly incarcerated along with other impacted-community stakeholders to make key decisions for the redevelopment of Rikers. This would include community-led design and planning processes, and significant stake in ensuring workforce development interests are represented as well as public space and memorials on the island. The precedent case of the Women’s Building in Chapter Three underscored the value of, not only including, but centering the leadership of those impacted by incarceration in the redevelopment of prison land. Key advisory committee members should represent a diversity of neighborhoods highlighted earlier in this chapter, as well as representatives from justice advocacy groups like Just Leadership, No New Jails, and
Exodus Transitional Community.
— Support legislation to create a task force for the study of reparations for
Black New Yorkers
62 Incarceration is an extension of slavery: this is the thesis of Ava Duvernay’s 2016 film
13th, which explores the unbroken practice of captivity and punishment against Black
Amercians since the Antebellum era. As discussion about reformation of the carceral system has gained public attention, so has the parallel concept of reparations, which proposes financial compensation for the devastating impacts of slavery on Black
Americans. While legislation on reparations has been proposed for decades, the concept has gained new life, with hearings on H.R. 40, a bill that would create a commission to study and examine reparations, heard in the House of Representatives in the summer of 2019. A similar proposal has come forth in New Jersey, where that state’s Legislative Black Caucus has proposed the creation of a task force to study how the state can make reparations to Black residents (O’Dea, 2019). Provided the vast evidence that mass incarceration is a modern manifestation of racism and disproportionately impacts communities of color, The City of New York should support a state commission to study reparations for Black New Yorkers. This recommendation is to support the state, rather than the city, in advancing legislation on reparations because upstate communities have also been significantly impacted by incarceration.
4.2 LIMITATIONS
The research performed for this thesis is caveated by several methodological and content-based limitations. The primary limitation is the small sample of interviews conducted for stakeholder analysis in Chapter Three. As mentioned in the previous chapter, these individuals are not representative of the full spectrum of stakeholders that would need to be engaged for a redevelopment process on
Rikers.
At the moment of this writing, Rikers is a moving target, with new, almost daily, revelations about steps the City is taking towards redevelopment, as well as
63 community responses to these changes. In addition to the challenge of ensuring the most recent narrative developments is included in this research, quantitative analysis was extremely limited for the purposes of this report. Open data from
DOC and NYPD is scarce and opaque, with little to no public information about where Rikers inmates are coming from, who they are and where they go after incarceration. Much of this information was dependent on previous investigations of these data sources, typically involving a Freedom of Information Act request.
4.3 AREAS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
There are several areas of research that could be expanded and further explored to understand the development capacity of Rikers. Comparative practices of redevelopment on landfill would be useful to see the possibilities for environmentally sensitive land that can accommodate new uses like parks and facilities. This is important because it is noted as a significant barrier to development by the Lippman Commission as well as other sources.
4.4 CONCLUSION
There is little evidence that prisons and jails make communities safer and are not simply a tool to violate human rights and punish the poor. Society is collectively coming to a place that recognizes the failure of incarceration, actively seeking strategies to diminish the use of punishment as a form of conflict resolution. Rikers is a product – emblematic of bad policy and politics, but not a cause in and of itself. Its closure allows for reflection about not only the atrocities that occurred inside of Rikers, but the forces that compelled it to exist. The “usable past” of
Rikers is one that, hopefully, elevates a collective sense of agency and through the
64 connections between land and memory, recognizes the city and region as a single organism. If parts of the organism are neglected, the entire body will suffer.
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73 APPENDIX
APPENDIX: Interview Questions
Project goal:
The goal of this thesis is to explore opportunities to redevelop Rikers Island in a way that fosters restorative justice and furthers principles of equity, decarceration and participatory planning.
Interview questions:
• How have you been involved in the campaign to close Rikers Island?
• The island is over 400 acres – how, if at all, do you think it should be redeveloped after the jail is closed?
• Do you think that planning of the island should involve communities with the highest rates of incarceration?
• If so, who are those communities?
• Restorative justice is a process that holds offending parties accountable using participatory, non-hierarchal, engagement that emphasizes community empowerment. In the case of Rikers Island, the offending party is the state. My thesis suggests that allowing impacted communities to lead the process of redevelopment is a form of restorative justice – does this application of RJ align with your understanding of the practice?
• If yes, do you consider this a form of restorative justice?
• Currently, proposals have been put forward to redevelop Rikers into a number of different uses: an extension of LaGuardia airport, light manufacturing, public parks, affordable housing and hub for renewable energy. Which, if any, of these elements are appropriate and who do you think will benefit from them?
• What makes a good plan for a reimagined Rikers?
74 • Who should be involved in the redevelopment of Rikers Island and who should it be for?
• Follow up: What types of criteria should be required for redevelopment?
• How should the legacy of Rikers inform its future? And how should it be memorialized, if at all?
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