Rikers Island

Based on Wikipedia: Rikers Island

It costs more than half a million dollars to keep one person locked up on Rikers Island for a year. That's $556,539, to be precise—a figure that could pay for a luxury apartment in Manhattan, a four-year degree at an Ivy League school, or a very comfortable retirement. Instead, it buys twelve months of confinement on a 413-acre island in New York's East River, a place that has been called one of the ten worst correctional facilities in the United States.

This is the central paradox of America's most infamous jail complex: it is extraordinarily expensive to run, yet notorious for producing terrible outcomes for almost everyone involved.

An Island Built on Garbage

Rikers Island takes its name from Abraham Rycken, a Dutch settler who claimed it in 1664. For over two centuries, the Rycken family (the spelling evolved to Riker over time) held onto this modest patch of land in the East River. When New York City finally purchased it in 1884, they paid $180,000—roughly $6 million in today's dollars.

The original island was less than 100 acres. Today it sprawls across more than 400 acres.

Where did all that extra land come from? Garbage. Mountains of it.

In 1922, New York City was banned by the courts from dumping its refuse in the ocean. Much of it ended up on Rikers instead. The island accumulated twelve artificial mountains of garbage, some rising 130 feet into the sky. Convicts provided the labor, hauling load after load of ash from the city's coal-burning furnaces and incinerators.

The garbage created a surreal landscape. Because so much of it was ash, the piles would spontaneously ignite. One warden described the nighttime scene in 1934:

"At night, it is like a forest of Christmas trees—first one little light... then another, until the whole hillside is lit up with little fires.... It was beautiful."

Beautiful is not a word typically associated with Rikers Island.

The garbage also brought rats—swarms of them, vast populations that resisted every control method authorities could devise. Poison gas failed. Poison bait failed. Ferocious dogs failed. Pigs, brought in to eat the rats, failed. One desperate New Yorker tried to organize a hunting party to shoot them.

It took Robert Moses, the legendary urban planner who reshaped New York City in the twentieth century, to finally clean up Rikers. Moses had a specific motivation: he was building the 1939 World's Fair in nearby Flushing Meadows, and he refused to let his carefully designed fairgrounds be marred by views of a smoldering garbage island. The city's trash was redirected to Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, which would eventually become one of the largest landfills in human history.

Even after the cleanup, Rikers continued to grow. Landfill operations didn't stop until 1943, by which point the island had expanded from 90 acres to 415. Interestingly, 200 acres were also stripped away from Rikers during this period to help build what was then called North Beach Airport—later renamed LaGuardia.

A City of Jails

Here's a distinction that matters: Rikers Island is not a prison. It's a jail.

In American legal terminology, prisons hold people who have been convicted of crimes and are serving sentences longer than one year. Jails, by contrast, hold people awaiting trial or serving short sentences of a year or less.

This distinction carries enormous implications. The vast majority of people on Rikers—about 85 percent—have not been convicted of anything. They are legally innocent, held either because they cannot afford bail or because a judge has deemed them too dangerous to release. They might spend days, weeks, months, or even years on the island while their cases wind through the court system.

The remaining 15 percent are serving sentences short enough that the system hasn't bothered to transfer them to an actual prison.

At its peak capacity, Rikers can hold 15,000 people. The average daily population hovers around 10,000. But during the day, when you add staff and visitors to the detainee population, as many as 20,000 people may be on the island at once.

The complex consists of ten separate jails, each with its own function:

• The Robert N. Davoren Complex houses young men between 18 and 21
• The Eric M. Taylor Center holds sentenced adolescents and adults
• The Rose M. Singer Center is the only facility for women and girls
• The North Infirmary Command provides medical care and houses those in protective custody
• The West Facility isolates detainees with contagious diseases
• Several other facilities—the Otis Bantum Correctional Center, George R. Vierno Center, Anna M. Kross Center, and George Motchan Detention Center—house the bulk of adult male detainees

Beyond the jails themselves, Rikers functions as a small city. It has its own power plant, bakery, laundromat, barbershops, grocery stores, medical clinics, schools, chapels, gyms, ball fields, and even a car wash. There's a bus depot, a tailor shop, a print shop, and a large composting facility.

The only way in or out is the Francis Buono Bridge, a three-lane span stretching 4,200 feet from Queens. Before the bridge opened in 1966, the only access was by ferry. Even today, despite being politically part of the Bronx, Rikers can only be reached by road from Queens.

The Economics of Incarceration

Running Rikers Island is staggeringly expensive. In 2015, the annual budget was $860 million. That paid for 9,000 uniformed correction officers and 1,500 civilian staff to manage a facility that processed 100,000 admissions per year.

Do the math on that half-million-dollar annual cost per detainee, and you begin to understand why criminal justice reformers argue that almost anything would be cheaper than the status quo. Drug treatment programs, mental health services, housing assistance, job training—all of these interventions cost a fraction of what it takes to keep someone locked up.

But cost alone doesn't capture what makes Rikers so controversial.

A Reputation for Violence

Rikers has been called many things over the years. "New York's best-known jail" is one of the more neutral descriptions. More commonly, it's described as brutal, dangerous, and broken.

The violence runs in multiple directions. Detainees attack correction officers. Officers assault detainees. Detainees assault each other. In 2015, the facility recorded 9,424 assaults—the highest number in five years.

The violence escalated dramatically through the 2010s, attracting increasing press attention and judicial scrutiny. Court rulings have repeatedly found the New York City government liable for conditions inside the facility.

Mental illness compounds the problems. Rikers has become, almost by default, one of the largest mental health facilities in the country. People who might once have been treated in psychiatric hospitals now cycle through the jail system instead. The North Infirmary Command houses mentally ill detainees alongside those undergoing drug detoxification and those needing protective custody—a volatile mix.

The facility's reputation is so dire that in May 2013, Mother Jones magazine ranked it among the ten worst correctional facilities in the entire United States.

Strange Stories from the Island

Rikers Island has generated some remarkably strange stories over its history.

Consider the Salvador Dalí affair. In 1965, the surrealist artist was invited to give a talk about art to the prisoners but couldn't attend. As an apology, he sent a drawing. For sixteen years, this original Dalí hung in the inmate dining room. In 1981, it was moved to a prison lobby for safekeeping.

In March 2003, someone stole it and replaced it with a fake.

The investigation eventually led to three correctional officers and an assistant deputy warden. The officers pleaded guilty; the warden was acquitted. But the drawing has never been recovered. Somewhere out there, an authentic Salvador Dalí remains in the possession of someone connected to the Rikers Island theft ring.

Or consider the plane crash. On February 1, 1957, Northeast Airlines Flight 823 crashed onto Rikers Island shortly after departing LaGuardia Airport. Twenty passengers died; 78 were injured.

What happened next was remarkable. Both correction officers and inmates ran toward the wreckage to help survivors. Their heroism was officially recognized: 30 of the 57 inmates who assisted were released entirely, and 16 others had their sentences reduced by six months. Governor Averell Harriman granted commutations to eleven more.

Then there's the floating jail. During David Dinkins' mayoral term in the early 1990s, Rikers became so overcrowded that the city needed additional capacity immediately. Their solution was the Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center—an 800-bed barge.

The keel was laid in 1989 at a shipyard in New Orleans. When completed, the barge was towed all the way up the Atlantic coast and the East River to its current mooring near Hunts Point. It remains the only vessel of its type in the world—a floating jail that cost $161 million to build.

Before the Vernon C. Bain, New York had experimented with converting British military transport barges left over from the Falklands War. These ships could house 800 soldiers but, after conversion, only accommodated 200 inmates each. The city also converted two 1950s-era Staten Island ferryboats to hold 162 inmates apiece. The ferries were eventually sold for salvage around 2003.

Before the Jails: A Civil War Training Ground

Long before Rikers became synonymous with incarceration, it served a very different purpose. During the Civil War, the island functioned as a military training camp for Union regiments.

The first unit to arrive was the 9th New York Infantry in May 1861—better known as Hawkins' Zouaves. Zouave units were named for their distinctive uniforms, modeled on those worn by French colonial troops in North Africa. The style was popular in the early Civil War, though the brightly colored baggy trousers and short jackets proved impractical for actual combat.

Other units followed: the 36th New York State Volunteers, then the Anderson Zouaves. The Anderson Zouaves' commander, John Lafayette Riker, was related to the family that still owned the island at the time.

The Anderson Zouaves named their encampment "Camp Astor" after John Jacob Astor Jr., who had helped fund the unit. The Astor family's women had even sewn the zouave uniforms worn by the recruits.

By 1884, the military training days were over, and New York City's Commission of Charities and Corrections was eyeing the island for a very different use.

The Birth of a Gang

Not all of Rikers' legacy involves infrastructure and policy. Some of it involves culture—specifically, gang culture.

In 1993, two inmates named Omar Portee and Leonard McKenzie founded the United Blood Nation while locked up in the George Motchan Detention Center. The gang, affiliated with the Bloods, would spread far beyond Rikers' walls to become one of the largest and most violent street gangs on the East Coast.

This is one of the bitter ironies of incarceration: facilities designed to control crime sometimes become incubators for new criminal organizations. The concentrated population of young men, the tribal dynamics of prison survival, the need for protection—all of these factors can forge criminal networks that outlast any individual sentence.

The AIDS Crisis and Compassion

Not every chapter in Rikers' history is grim. During the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, the facility made an unusual humanitarian gesture.

At the request of the Association for Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment and its executive director Yolanda Serrano, Rikers began granting early release to inmates who were terminally ill with HIV. The reasoning was simple: these men and women were going to die, and they deserved to die peacefully in their own homes rather than in a jail cell.

It was a small mercy in a system not known for mercy.

The Long Road to Closure

By the 2010s, momentum was building to close Rikers entirely.

In February 2016, New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito convened the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform—commonly called the Lippman Commission after its chair, former Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman. The commission was tasked with reviewing the entire criminal justice system.

That April, activist Glenn E. Martin launched a campaign explicitly calling for Rikers' closure. In September, he organized a march from Queens Plaza to the Rikers Island Bridge, demanding that Mayor Bill de Blasio shut down the complex.

After a year of study, the Lippman Commission released its recommendations. The plan was ambitious: close all ten jails on Rikers over a ten-year period and replace them with smaller facilities in each borough, located closer to the courthouses. For this to work, the island's population would need to drop from around 10,000 to approximately 5,000.

This wasn't as far-fetched as it might sound. Since 1991, Rikers' population had already dropped by more than 50 percent through various reforms—addressing case delays, expanding alternatives to detention, and improving discharge services.

In October 2019, the New York City Council voted to close Rikers Island by December 31, 2026.

Whether that deadline will actually be met remains to be seen. Plans for a new 1,500-bed facility on the island were put on "pause" as the closure debate intensified. The political, logistical, and financial challenges of shuttering such an enormous complex are immense.

What Rikers Tells Us

Rikers Island is, in many ways, a physical embodiment of American ambivalence about incarceration. We have built, on an island of garbage, a city-sized facility to hold people—most of whom have not been convicted of any crime—at a cost that exceeds what many countries spend per capita on their entire citizenry.

The facility has produced violence, trauma, and, in at least one case, one of the most influential street gangs in the country. It has also, occasionally, produced moments of unexpected humanity: inmates risking their lives to save plane crash survivors, early release for the dying, a Salvador Dalí original hanging where prisoners ate their meals.

For anyone interested in the costs of youth incarceration—or incarceration at any age—Rikers serves as both a cautionary tale and a case study. At half a million dollars per person per year, we are paying enormous sums for outcomes that almost no one would call successful.

The question isn't really whether we can afford to close Rikers. The question is whether we can afford to keep it open.