Because of the aging infrastructure and frequent violence, human rights activists and criminologists have been calling for the closure of the prison for years, in which prominent inmates such as the rapper Tupac Shakur and the former IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn were held.
New York City Council has now approved Mayor Bill de Blasio’s $ 8.7 billion plan. “The age of mass imprisonment is over,” De Blasio told journalists afterwards. In the 1990s, up to 20,000 people were housed on the prison island; at last it was around 8,000.
Instead of Rikers Island, four new prisons are to be built in the districts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. The city government promises better prison conditions in the new facilities, and they should also be safer and easier to reach for the prisoners’ relatives. This is to facilitate the rehabilitation of prisoners after their release.
The city government’s decision also provoked protests. Criticism was particularly loud of De Blasio’s plan to replace Rikers Island with detention centers close to the center. Other opponents of the plan called for the money granted to be used to combat the causes of crime.
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