[NYguy]

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/n...817-story.html

The looming reality of closing Rikers


By ALYSSA KATZ
AUG 20, 2018

Maybe the reality of the hulking jails Mayor de Blasio just proposed for four city neighborhoods hasn’t quite registered yet, so take a moment to let it all soak in:

Following (more or less) the prescription of a task force led by the formidable former New York Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, he’s committed to close all the jails on wretched Rikers Island by 2027, reduce the jail population in the meantime and begin to confine inmates — detainees awaiting trial, parole violators and those serving short sentences — in borough facilities.

The new plans on the boards show it also soars with massive towers to be crammed into the city grid, two of them in downtowns already aggrieved at intensive development and gridlocked traffic, and one in an area clawing its way out of a crime siege.

Solving for the very real problem of Rikers Island’s savage remoteness, the new plan creates a politically potent problem of urban density and all of the complications and costs that come with it, in order to house up to 1,510 men and women at each of the borough locations along with unbreakable security, LEED green-building standards and all the support facilities incarceration demands, from food service to laundry to medical wards.

Those problems are not unfixable. The developers of glassy towers for billionaires and their lessers do it all the time. Bulky buildings are part of the weave of a growing, dynamic city.

But the start of the planning process demanded cannily by City Council Speaker Corey Johnson to corral de Blasio into producing buildable plans forces vivid reality into view: The incarceration of a relative handful of people would require the most massive public-works construction project this city has seen in years, looming monuments putting on display the very imprisonment the close-Rikers movement recoils from.

The tower in downtown Brooklyn is sketched to rise as much as 430 feet tall, the equivalent of a 33-story high rise — a near match for the MetroTech court building where many defendants will face trial. By comparison, the old House of Detention that would be demolished rises half as high.

Manhattan’s, at the foot of Foley Square and looming over heavily used Columbus Park, would jut above the federal courthouse at 500 Pearl. The Bronx tower would match the high-rises of Co-op City, and include courtrooms for arraignments because it’s two miles away from the borough’s Criminal Court.