Joint Pain

Two local elected officials are demanding meaningful consultation with the community before the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio moves ahead with a plan to create a giant new prison complex in Lower Manhattan. City Council member Margaret Chin and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer will lead a public Town Hall meeting to discuss these plans on September 12, at P.S. 124 (located at 40 Division Street, between the Bowery and Market Street), starting at 6:00 pm.

This development comes in the wake of the disclosure, during the summer, that City officials are in the initial stages of planning a new high-rise prison facility, possibly located at 80 Centre Street, a nine-story structure built in the 1920s (also known as the Louis J. Lefkowitz State Office Building), which occupies the full block bounded by Centre, Worth, Baxter, and Leonard Streets. The preliminary plan would preserve the facade of the existing building, while gutting its interior, and adding a 40-story jail tower to its roof.

	Margaret Chin

“While the administration has much more work to do, the scheduling of this long-overdue meeting is a positive development for residents, business owners and community leaders,” Ms. Chin said. “At this Town Hall, the community will have an opportunity to learn more about the project, have their questions answered, and participate in a discussion on the future of the Manhattan Detention Center site. I am hopeful that this is the first step, of many more, towards greater clarity and transparency about this project.”

Ms. Brewer remarked that, “this town hall is a positive step in the right direction, after the administration’s disappointing rush to scope the project without adequate community input. An expanded detention complex in Lower Manhattan is necessary, but no project this sweeping should ever go forward without robust input and involvement from the surrounding community’s residents, businesses, civic organizations and service providers.”

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This issue first came to local attention at a March meeting of Community Board 1 (CB1), where chair Anthony Notaro noted that, “the City has made a decision to close Rikers Island,” the scandal-plagued Queens facility that currently serves as the central detention complex for all five boroughs of New York City. It is there that prisoners awaiting trial, denied bail, or serving sentences of less than one year are sent.

“The plan ultimately will be to close that facility and replace it with four City jails in each of the four boroughs, except Staten Island,” Mr. Notaro continued. “The next step is to determine how that will be implemented, what the population will be, and lots of other things.”

The Independent Commission’s report envisions a new jail facility woven seamlessly into the fabric of the surrounding community, predicting that, “these new facilities would be designed to serve not just detainees, corrections officers, and other staff, but surrounding neighborhoods.

For Manhattan, “the location would potentially be the old Tombs building,” he noted. This was a reference to a Dickensian facility notorious for both corruption and squalid conditions that housed prisoners who ran afoul of the law in Manhattan from the 1830s, until the early 1970s, when a U.S. District Court judge ordered it shut for numerous violations of federal law. The structure took its name from its original design, which resembled an Egyptian sarcophagus.

After the federal courts intervened, the City closed down the Tombs for almost a decade, shifting its prisoner population to Rikers Island. After a nine-year renovation, the facility reopened at the same location — at White and Centre Streets — with a dramatically smaller capacity (the old structure had held up to 2,000 prisoners, but the refurbished Tombs was designed for only 900), and a scaled-back mission: the new “Manhattan Detention Complex” was meant primarily as a holding facility for detainees scheduled for appearances in the several court buildings located nearby.

Both of those dynamics now appear poised to change. The closure of Rikers Island will likely mark a return to the decentralized use of “borough houses” in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan, as Mr. Notaro observed.

And if even one-fifth of the current Rikers Island prisoner headcount of approximately 9,000 detainees are moved to a new Manhattan facility, that would 1,800 prisoners being assigned to that complex, along with the 900-plus already housed within the building. This would make  the detainee population of such a facility larger than that of Attica prison, in upstate New York.

But even these figures may be understated. According to, “A More Just New York City,” a report by the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, fully 38 percent of the jail population throughout the five boroughs comes from courts and prosecutors in Manhattan. “No other borough comes close,” the report noted, adding that this preponderance of prisoners is disproportionate to Manhattan’s share of the overall criminal caseload throughout the City, which comes to just 29 percent. This gap may be attributable, the report observes, to “prosecutorial patterns in Manhattan [pointing to] higher rates of pretrial detention and more punitive plea offers.”

The same analysis shows that Manhattan prosecutors surpass their colleagues in the other four boroughs in three key metrics: the overall number of arraignments on criminal charges, the number of defendants who are detained at arraignment, and the number who are imprisoned throughout their cases (from arrest through trial). Based on all of these indicators, the Independent Commission concludes that the largest of the new jails that would have to be constructed in the wake of a Rikers Island closure would be in Manhattan. Indeed, these indicators could be construed to mean that a new Manhattan prison complex would have to be designed to house as many as 3,600 prisoners. This would make the new facility more than double the size of the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in the Hudson Valley.

	Anthony Notaro

Moreover, there is very little chance that a new Manhattan jail would be built anywhere other than Downtown. Given the assemblage of court facilities located between the Brooklyn Bridge and Canal Street, situating a correctional institution anywhere else would entail logistical and security concerns likely to be deemed insurmountable.

But siting a new jail within Lower Manhattan also raises serious urban planning questions. The number of attorneys and family members likely to visit a facility housing more than 3,000 prisoners could further obstruct already an already-crowded streetscape. The number of guards and administrative personnel needed to staff and run such a complex (along with the fleet of large vehicles need to transport that many prisoners) might exacerbate this local crowding further still.

The Independent Commission’s report envisions a new jail facility woven seamlessly into the fabric of the surrounding community, predicting that, “these new facilities would be designed to serve not just detainees, corrections officers, and other staff, but surrounding neighborhoods. The exterior appearance of any jail facility should inspire confidence in what happens inside. There are many examples in the United States and abroad of holding facilities that manage to balance the demands of security with the need to present a welcoming face to the neighborhood.”

The report continues, “the exteriors of jail facilities should reflect the look and feel of their surroundings. They should also contain separate units, to be accessed from the street, that house services that offer programming to facilitate rehabilitation and reentry. These spaces could also be used to hold community meetings or public services like a library, a job training center, classrooms, as well as commercial and retail businesses.”

In a nod to the frenzied pace of development and property speculation that has characterized Lower Manhattan for the past two decades, the report argues that the existing Manhattan Detention Complex is, “proof that the presence of a jail does not necessarily lower real estate value.”

“This is going to take maybe as much as a decade,” Mr. Notaro concluded at the March CB1 meeting. “It will possibly involve a ULURP application,” he added, in a reference to the City’s “uniform land use review procedure,” which provides an opportunity for local elected officials and community leaders to weigh in on major land-use decisions. “But we’ve managed to make sure that CB1 will be represented,” he said. “It’s in the very early stages of planning, but it’s something we will have real input into.”