Over 40 members of the Campaign to Close Rikers rallied outside City Hall on Tuesday, urging lawmakers in the Committee on Criminal Justice hearing to deliver a budget that paves the way to closing Rikers. The FY 2027 Executive Budget is in the review phase, where the City Council committees negotiate with the Mayor until an agreement is reached by July 1.
Speaking at the rally City Council member Selvena Brooks-Powers, who represents south Brooklyn, and is chair of the Committee on Criminal Justice, said the budget shows whether city financing matches “our values”:
“If we are serious about reducing the jail population and meeting our legal obligations to close Rikers Island we must continue investing in programs that address the root issues. The more we invest in prevention, treatment, housing, and opportunity, the safer all of our communities will be,” Brooks-Powers said.
The Campaign, composed of formerly incarcerated people and their families in tandem with dozens of community and faith based organizations, is urging Mayor Mamdani and the City Council to move resources from the Department of Correction to crucial community investments like supportive housing, community-based treatment, alternatives to incarceration, and reentry programs. Examples include Intensive Mobile Treatment (IMT) teams, Forensic Assertive Community Treatment (FACT) teams, and housing for people with serious mental illness who are returning from Rikers, as well as ATI and reentry programs.
Rally participants held signs highlighting the exorbitant cost of detaining people at Rikers saying “It costs Half a Million Dollars to detain one person on Rikers for 1 year,” with the dollar amount highlighted in dollar bill green ink. Other signs argued funding should instead be invested in proven community resources saying “1 person on Rikers costs the same as 10 people receiving community based treatment” and “1 person on Rikers costs the same as 50 people served by alternative to incarceration programs.”
Rally participants also held up a large countdown clock counting down to the legal closure date of Rikers Island, putting pressure on this year’s budget to make significant funding shifts.
The rally comes from years of New Yorkers organizing to address the inhumane conditions at Rikers Island, one of the world's largest correctional institutions, where the majority of detainees are pretrial defendants. Since its opening in the 1930s, people detained in the facility have employed hunger strikes, work stoppages, and other direct actions to protest conditions. On the outside, formerly incarcerated people and their allies have been organizing for the closure of Rikers since the 1980s.
The movement found renewed energy when in 2014 the U.S. Justice Department released a report after an investigation of Rikers Island found “a pattern and practice of conduct at Rikers that violates the constitutional rights of adolescent inmates.” In 2015 a coalition of more than 100 organizations launched the #CLOSErikers campaign with an urgent call to close the jail. Due to the coalition’s successful organizing, in October 2019 City Council voted to close Rikers by August 2027 and replace it with four smaller borough-based jails. Since 2019, the Campaign to Close Rikers, which arose out of the #CLOSErikers campaign, has been tirelessly working to hold the city accountable to its legal obligation to close the jail.
Community advocates from organizations such as Freedom Agenda, Providence House, and the National Alliance on Mental Illness of New York City (NAMI-NYC) spoke on the root causes of incarceration, detailing how the reallocation of money towards community resources is an essential step towards closing Rikers.
“Rikers Island is the largest psychiatric care facility in New York and that is an indictment of our current mental health care system failing so many New Yorkers,” said Jonathan Chung of NAMI-NYC. “1 in 5 of New Yorkers live with a mental health condition and the other 4 are their family members and caregivers so we are all affected … It costs nearly half a million dollars to incarcerate somebody but then [they] tell us that there isn’t enough funding for mental health care support? We don’t buy that.”
Samantha Becerra of Providence House spoke on why supporting people post-incarceration will help decrease the population on Rikers.
“Every time a tragedy occurs behind the walls of Rikers we are reminded that incarceration alone cannot solve the challenges related to mental health, housing instability, poverty, or trauma. These issues require intervention, support, and resources that meet people where they are and help them build a path moving forward.”
After the rally some of the community advocates attended the hearing in City Hall. This was the final hearing for the committee on criminal justice before the city’s budget is finalized on July 1.
