LOWER BROADWAY — Angel Tueros was held at Rikers Island for more than a year. Reflecting on that period, he said he doesn’t want anyone to experience what he went through in the jail, which is known for its deplorable conditions.
“I remember one time being in a bed when it was raining, and I had to sleep for a few days with a bucket on my bed. It was very uncomfortable,” Tueros recalled. “Rodents would go into these cracks in the wall. There were roaches. A lot of roaches.
“It was just a very horrible experience to go through there.”
Tueros was one of hundreds of people who participated in a rally outside of City Hall on Aug. 31, calling on Mayor Zohran Mamdani to close Rikers Island.
The rally, “Countdown to Closing Rikers Day of Action,” was organized by a coalition of criminal justice reform groups, including Freedom Agenda. It took place exactly one year before Rikers Island is scheduled to be shut down.
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Tueros, a Catholic who lives in Queens, said his faith was one reason he attended the rally.
“As a Catholic, I believe in the Gospels,” he said. “I think the two fundamental ideas of our faith are forgiveness and love.”
The push to close Rikers has long drawn support from faith leaders who have framed the issue in similar terms of human dignity and redemption.
Back in October 2019, the New York City Council passed a plan to shutter Rikers Island by 2026 and replace it with four borough-based facilities. That deadline was later moved back to Aug. 31, 2027, amid delays in building the borough-based jails and reducing the city’s jail population.
Following the council’s 2019 vote, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, and Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn expressed support for closing Rikers Island.
“Rikers has got to go,” Cardinal Dolan said at a press conference, with Bishop DiMarzio adding that “the conditions there are beyond repair.”
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However, officials in Mayor Mamdani’s administration have, on multiple occasions this year, stated that New York City cannot meet that deadline.
Mayor Mamdani also stated in an April 7 press conference that the 2027 deadline to close Rikers Island is “practically impossible to fulfill” because of what he termed inaction by the previous administration of former mayor Eric Adams in overseeing the construction of the borough jails.
“It’s going to take us quite a bit of time to ensure that we can put our city back on the path that the City Council voted for in 2019, and it will also take a whole-of-government approach,” Mamdani told reporters.
Set on an island in the East River near the Bronx, the 415-acre Rikers Island is New York City’s largest jail and the second-largest jail in the United States. According to the Vera Institute of Justice, 6,499 people were held at Rikers Island as of Aug. 31, most of whom have not been convicted of a crime but are awaiting a court date or trial. The institute also reported that seven Rikers Island inmates have died in Department of Correction custody this year.
At several points during the rally, participants, many of whom carried signs reading “It costs half a million dollars to detain 1 person on Rikers for 1 Year,” chanted “Shut it down!” and “Hey, hey, ho, ho. Rikers Island has got to go!”
However, while the rally organizers called for the jail’s closure, many of the speakers acknowledged that the Mamdani administration is unlikely to meet the 2027 goal. Still, rally organizers said they plan to press forward.
“We may not be able to close it altogether by the deadline, but we can close parts of it, and we can work toward alternatives to incarceration,” said Darren Mack, co-director of Freedom Agenda.
Mack, who said the Mamdani Administration has shuttered three sections of Rikers Island since taking office in January, added, “We’ve made more progress in the past eight months than we have in the past four years.”
One rally goer, Marco Barrios, who was formerly incarcerated, said he grew closer to his Catholic faith while in prison, working alongside the chaplain in the upstate prison where he did time. He currently visits Rikers Island twice a week to work with detainees and said he is shocked by the conditions he sees there.
“The conditions are insane and not just for the people who are being detained, but also for the correctional officers and other staff. It’s a terrible environment,” he said, describing cracked ceilings, pools of water on the floor, undrinkable water, and terrible odors in the air. “I don’t think anyone should be living there.”
Councilwoman Alexa Avilés, a Democrat representing District 38, which includes Sunset Park along with Red Hook and parts of several other Brooklyn neighborhoods, spoke of visiting relatives detained at Rikers Island, noting that visitors are not always treated well.
“Every time I stepped on that island, a little bit of my dignity was taken away,” she said, adding that the only answer is closing the jail. “We know what we have to do. Now, it is a matter of political will.”