Mamdani Backs Closing Toxic Rikers, Suggests Solar Facility Could Power Cleaner Future

Plans to shut down New York’s notorious Rikers Island jail and repurpose its land threaten to reshape both the city’s justice system and its environmental future.

On the rare, windless days that pungency from the landfill recedes, Rikers Island can appear almost bucolic—a mirage that vanishes the moment one sets foot outside the bus. The city’s largest jail complex, infamous for its squalor and violence, held over 6,000 people on any given day as of last year. Detainees languish, on average, two months before trial. Under the last mayor, Eric Adams, 48 people died either in municipal custody or soon after release between 2022 and 2023—a mortality rate that dwarfs those of peer cities. If any place portends the grim consequences of a broken incarceration system, it is Rikers.

Yet winds of change are picking up. On the campaign trail, Yusuf Mamdani, New York’s new mayor, staked his reputation on shuttering the facility—a move the city council ploddingly endorsed as far back as 2019, but which has meandered stolidly through committee rooms ever since. A recent federal monitor’s report (the Nunez report), filed in stark legalese, now urges that closure projects be accelerated. Not only injustice, but plain environmental hazard weighs against continued use: built atop a toxic landfill, Rikers seeps hazardous chemicals and sports an ailing power plant that belches particulates into the lungs of detainees and nearby working-class, largely Black and Latino communities.

The proposal on the table is audacious: close Rikers, raze its decayed buildings, decontaminate the earth, and construct a mammoth renewable energy hub on the 413-acre site. Luxeum Renewables, among other private consortia, publicly courts the idea. A feasibility study released in January 2024 suggests enough photovoltaic panels could be installed to power up to 35,000 homes—a modest but symbol-laden start for climate plans that otherwise lumber at a glacial pace.

The implications for New York City are gargantuan. Rikers’ geographical isolation—marooned in the East River, accessible via a single bridge—punishes not only those detained, but their loved ones. Families, often from Brooklyn and the Bronx, spend hours each week skirting clogged expressways simply for a brief visit. Defence attorneys attest, to little apparent effect, that such remoteness saps their ability to prepare cases and access clients; trial delays metastasise. Relocating detainees to smaller, newer borough-based jails, situated near courts, could reduce hardship for thousands and wage bureaucratic war on New York’s chronic case backlogs.

Scratch the surface, though, and a more fraught set of second-order consequences beckons. Residents near new jail sites in Lower Manhattan and Queens voice anxiety—predictable, perhaps, but not wholly unfounded—about disorder, property values and pressure on local services. Construction costs atop expensive New York real estate will far exceed those of upkeep at Rikers, at least in the short term. Nor will environmental remediation come cheap: estimates for remediating decades of landfill leachate and retrofitting the power infrastructure run into the hundreds of millions, before a single solar panel is bolted down.

Politically, the scheme tests the mettle of a new mayoralty keen to distinguish itself from its predecessors’ inertia. Adams, for all his tough-on-crime posturing, foundered when pressed on jail reform; Mamdani, a product of the city’s progressive coalition, frames closure as both moral and pragmatic. Business groups and corrections unions line up on either side, their positions as predictable as sunrise. Some suspect ulterior motives—gentrification by stealth, or an eye to lucrative green development contracts. Others wager that the real motivator is federal legal pressure: the Nunez consent decree, under which oversight of Rikers rests, brings the threat of a full-blown receivership if conditions stagnate.

The Sargasso Sea of American incarceration offers little solace or inspiration. Most large U.S. cities operate jails that are newer, closer to courts, and—though hardly models of pastoral welfare—less lethal than Rikers. Chicago’s Cook County Jail, though itself imperfect, has succeeded in cutting its daily population by about 40% over a decade, combining elimination of money bail with expansion of rehabilitation programmes. Abroad, even hard-nosed regimes like Singapore manage to run detention centres that would make Rikers’ ruins look medieval by comparison.

Globally, the notion of repurposing punitive infrastructure for civic good seems to be catching on. Oslo refashioned the site of a grim prewar prison into a mixed-income housing development threaded with greenways. New Yorkers’ ambition—clustered around visions of renewable energy, cleaner air, and more humane justice—is of the same genus, if notably more grandiose.

A test of the city’s will—and stamina

The path forward, as so often in New York, will likely be bumpy, expensive and protracted. The city’s bureaucracy is slow-moving, and NIMBYism—never in short supply—is already gaining new adherents. Yet the case for closure grows only more compelling as fresh data emerges: according to the Board of Correction, rates of staff absenteeism, violence, and facility breakdown are trending stubbornly upward. Staving off federal takeover, let alone avoiding further tragedy, may now depend on progress as much as principle.

Sceptics, understandably, fret that shrinking a jail system in the face of crime anxiety courts political backlash. But the evidence is clear: most held on Rikers are detainees awaiting trial, not convicts, and violent crime in the city has ticked down since pandemic peaks. Bold steps—like investing in pretrial support and community health, and trading decrepit isolation for transparency and proximity—should be measured by outcomes, not by nostalgia for failed models.

In the end, closing Rikers will test not just New York’s technical prowess or financial muscle, but its sense of possibility. To dismantle a hulking vestige of law-and-order excess and replace it with something cleaner—in both moral and atmospheric terms—would be a rare, bracing assertion of civic imagination. The city should seize the chance. ■