[ This community-developed plan could serve as a model for how to
simultaneously decarcerate and decarbonize.]
[[link removed]]

THE VISION OF A RENEWABLE RIKERS ISLAND IN NYC  
[[link removed]]


 

Claire Greenburger
November 7, 2023
Yes Magazine
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ This community-developed plan could serve as a model for how to
simultaneously decarcerate and decarbonize. _

Close Rikers advocates march in August to remind Mayor Adams of his
legal and moral obligation to close Rikers by 2027, (Courtesy of
Freedom Agenda, Photo by Shanaz Deen)

 

Along, narrow bridge spanning the East River in New York City is the
sole link between two realities. To the south, the familiar city
skyline stands tall. To the north, walls of barbed wire enclose the
site of an ongoing human rights crisis: the Rikers Island jail
complex. This bridge, known to justice-impacted New Yorkers as “the
bridge of pain,” is a constant reminder of their isolation from
loved ones. 

Rikers, located on an island between the boroughs of Queens and the
Bronx, is one of the largest jail complexes in the United States. It
houses nearly 6,000
[[link removed]] people,
the vast majority of whom are pretrial defendants who have not been
convicted of a crime. 

Rikers is notorious for its dire conditions and high death rates.
“Almost everybody is worse off for spending any amount of time at
Rikers,” says Zachary Katznelson, policy director at
the Independent Commission on NYC Criminal Justice and Incarceration
Reform [[link removed]]. “It’s an incubator of violence
and misery.” 

Since the beginning of 2022, 28 people
[[link removed]] have
died on Rikers. Correctional officers doled out 400
[[link removed]] head
strikes since the beginning of last year, compared to 52
[[link removed]] at
Los Angeles County jails during the same period, despite L.A.’s
larger jail population and notoriety for use of excessive force.

Hope Sanders. _Courtesy of Freedom Agenda, photo by Edwin Santana_

“It’s a dark and dank and dreary place,” says Hope Sanders, who
was sent to Rikers in the mid-’90s at age 16. It was clear to her as
soon as she arrived that “[Rikers] was unsafe for children” like
herself. “The officers called us ‘animal-lescents,’” she says.
Sanders vividly remembers the stench of rotting garbage, as well as
mice, roaches, and the “terrible” air quality. 

Beyond the well-documented issues of violence and neglect, there is
another hidden danger that looms at Rikers: The jail was built on a
landfill, and its decomposing garbage emits methane
[[link removed]] gas.
“We know that methane does very bad things to human beings, in
addition to what it does for the climate,” says Rebecca Bratspies,
law professor at the City University of New York School of Law and
director of the Center for Urban Environmental Reform
[[link removed]]. 

But some advocates envision a different future for this island. In
response to the shocking reports of violence and toxic conditions at
the facility, justice-impacted individuals devised a plan to shut down
the jail and repurpose the island. The Renewable Rikers
[[link removed]] plan
aims to transform the facility into a hub for renewable energy—a
source of hope amid the ongoing threats of violence and climate
change. The proposed project seeks to benefit the people and
communities that Rikers has historically harmed. 

A TOXIC FOUNDATION

In 1884, the year New York City bought Rikers Island, it occupied less
than 88 acres. In the following decades, the city hauled in garbage
and ash to expand the landmass, with the landfill labor performed
almost entirely by incarcerated people. By 1932, when the jail opened,
the island had more than quadrupled in size to 413 acres. 

The landfill is a weak foundation for the buildings on Rikers,
contributing to crumbling infrastructure. Katznelson describes seeing
blankets covering the floors to absorb the rainwater flooding one
building during a recent visit. He says the buildings are “so far
gone” that they are not fixable and even serve as a source of
weapons at Rikers, posing yet another safety risk to those inside.
“You can just break [a piece] off almost anywhere, and you can use
it as a weapon. It’s just a living, dangerous thing,” Katznelson
says. 

Isolating toxic waste and polluting industries in minority and
lower-income communities is a common practice in this country, and
that inequity is exacerbated in prisons. As in the greater U.S. prison
population, Black and Latinx individuals are disproportionately
incarcerated at Rikers, which pulls 90%
[[link removed]] of
its population from these groups, who represent just 52%
[[link removed]] of
NYC’s general population.

One-third
[[link removed]] of
state and federal prisons in the U.S. are located within 3 miles of a
federal Superfund
[[link removed]] site. Exposure to
these hazardous waste sites poses a threat to incarcerated people’s
health, but due to the terms of their incarceration, they have no way
to escape this threat. 

Darren Mack. _Courtesy of Freedom Agenda, photo by Shanaz Deen_

When Darren Mack was incarcerated at Rikers in the 1990s, he was
unaware of the toxic conditions that existed around him. “It
wasn’t until I actually went back to Rikers as a volunteer for a
restorative justice pilot project for adolescents that, for the first
time, I saw a sign that said ‘Don’t drink the water,’” says
Mack, co-founder and co-director of a grassroots decarceration
organization called Freedom Agenda [[link removed]].
Though visitors were advised to avoid drinking it, “people who are
detained there are forced to drink the water,” he says. “That was
a red flag.” 

Rikers was designed to be out of sight out and out of mind—a theme
consistent throughout U.S. environmental sacrifice zones. A New Yorker
myself, I did not know Rikers Island existed until I had to. When I
was 11 years old, my older brother was arrested and sent to Rikers to
await trial. Suddenly I saw the tremendous pain, suffering, and
injustice Rikers inflicted. 

Like half
[[link removed]] of
the people at Rikers, my brother suffers from mental illness. He spent
the majority of his 18-month term in solitary confinement, an inhumane
and overutilized practice. At the time, I struggled to understand what
my brother was going through. Now, having spent the past year
researching and reporting on the issues at Rikers, I know the
conditions are worse than I could have imagined.

In 2012, a group of cancer-diagnosed correctional officers
filed lawsuits
[[link removed]] against
the city and the Department of Corrections (DOC), claiming their
diseases were the result of their exposure to the toxic landfill while
working at Rikers. The city denied the victims’ claims, and their
cases were dismissed. 

In addition to methane in the air on Rikers itself, the island is less
than a mile from Hunts Point, a predominantly Black and Latinx
neighborhood in the Bronx that has been coined “Asthma Alley” due
to dangerously high levels of PM2.5
[[link removed]] (fine
particulate matter less than 2.5 microns in diameter). Rikers is also
in LaGuardia Airport’s flight path, exposing those at Rikers
to carcinogenic exhaust
[[link removed]] and
significant noise pollution from the more than 1,000 flights that take
off and land at the airport every day. 

A CLEANER, FAIRER FUTURE

After decades of anti-Rikers advocacy and awareness-building, a
successful movement finally took hold. “For the first time, in 2016
a grassroots campaign of survivors of Rikers like myself, family
members, allies, and organizational partners built a broad-based
movement that was so deep that it changed the hearts and minds of New
Yorkers,” Mack says. 

Sanders, after serving a 20-year sentence, went back to school to
become a social worker and joined the Campaign to Close Rikers
[[link removed]], alongside Mack. “My experiences
[at Rikers] angered me, but also gave me a passion to move forward and
do everything that I could to try to prevent [others from suffering
the same fate],” Sanders says. 

As a result of the #CLOSErikers
[[link removed]] campaign—and a
subsequent report
[[link removed]] by
the council-appointed Lippman Commission that concluded that the
facility should be shut down—advocates’ demands have become stated
policy: The city has committed to closing Rikers by 2027.

The city’s decarceration plan
[[link removed]] involves a drastic reduction in the
city jail population; a transition to a smaller, borough-based jail
system; and an increase in hospital beds to treat the many people
behind bars who are in need of treatment rather than incarceration.
However, due to the recent rise in the city jail population, critics
[[link removed]] argue
that a jail system half the size of the current one cannot keep New
Yorkers safe, inevitably leading to overcrowding in jails and an
increase in those they deem “violent criminals” on city streets.

“The reason we’re closing Rikers—the reason we’ve been making
this argument for years—is that Rikers undermines safety every day
that it’s open,” Katznelson says. He says that violence is so
embedded in its ethos and its infrastructure that the jail is beyond
reform. “You can’t bring a whole new culture and way of operating
[into] the existing structure. You need a clean break from what you
have.”

The proposed borough-based jail system, Katznelson says, could
streamline NYC’s notoriously slow and bogged-down judicial system,
which would reduce the number of people in jail awaiting trial. 

The mandate to close Rikers has opened doors for imagining future uses
of the island. Four hundred acres is a substantial landmass in New
York, the most densely populated city in the U.S., with 26,403 people
per square mile. 

Proposals have included using the land as an extension of LaGuardia
Airport
[[link removed].] or
as the site of affordable housing
[[link removed]].
But these proposals fail to get to the root of the environmental
concerns on the island and would continue to expose its next residents
to toxic conditions. Justice-impacted New Yorkers wanted to break the
cycle of harm. 

Those who have spent time at Rikers “almost unanimously requested
that the jail be closed and that the land be used for something
positive. That would in many ways be the best memorial and honoring of
the suffering that’s happened there,” Katznelson says._ _From
this aspiration, a visionary plan has emerged that seeks to
simultaneously address two of the biggest, most difficult-to-solve
disasters of our time: mass incarceration and the climate crisis. 

The plan for Renewable Rikers
[[link removed]] envisions
replacing the facility with green infrastructure to help the city
reach its goal of 100% clean electricity by 2040
[[link removed].].
This would allow the city to replace its antiquated wastewater
treatment facilities with new, more efficient technology on the
island. “New York is continually in violation of the Clean Water Act
because we don’t have the capacity to adequately clean and treat the
[waste]water we release,” Bratspies says. Renewable Rikers would
change that. “It’s like a win-win-win!”

Solar panels and battery storage on the island would replace oil- and
gas-fired peaker plants, which are activated during times of high
energy demand. In New York City, peaker plants
[[link removed]] are
located predominantly in communities of color, “spewing
pollutants,” says Bratspies. Shutting them down would significantly
improve the air quality and health outcomes in these communities, she
says. 

Sanders, who now lives in the Bronx, sees a peaker plant every day
while walking in her neighborhood. If such facilities were shut down,
Sanders envisions using the land for “green parks where children
could play, without having to worry about traffic or warehouses or
peaker plants—somewhere where they can really just enjoy nature.”

While Rikers’ isolation has worsened its conditions as a jail, as a
renewable energy site this isolation works to its advantage. “One
of the concerns you have with battery storage is potential for
fires,” Bratspies says. “An island where nobody’s living is
probably a really good place to have a lot of dense battery
storage.”

In keeping with its restorative justice philosophy, Renewable Rikers
would offer a job training program for people whose lives have been
upended by incarceration. Advocates believe the program will also aid
larger decarceration goals: “If you help people flourish, your needs
for policing and incarceration plummet,” Bratspies says. 

Renewable Rikers. _Courtesy of Andrea Johnson for Regional Plan
Association_

THE CITY SIGNS ON

Renewable Rikers has the potential to set a new standard. Though
cities nationwide are seeking to close their jails and reduce jail
populations, no others have developed a plan that also incorporates
climate solutions. Renewable Rikers can serve as a model for how to
simultaneously decarcerate and decarbonize. 

When the City Council and then–Mayor de Blasio successfully passed
the Renewable Rikers Act
[[link removed]] in 2021, the vision
moved one step closer to becoming a reality—and one step closer to
offering justice for survivors like my brother, Mack, and Sanders.

The act mandates a study of the island’s capacity for renewable
energy and the transfer of any unused land and buildings from the DOC
to the Department of Citywide Administrative Services. But since Mayor
Adams took office in 2022, he hasn’t initiated the land transfer or
appointed commissioners to the Renewable Rikers advisory committee.
“The crisis has [been] exacerbated under his administration,” Mack
says. “He’s on the wrong side of history.” 

Rather than outside “experts” or academics imposing a solution to
the problem, “[Renewable Rikers] was developed alongside, and in
many ways by, people who are formerly incarcerated and people who live
in environmental justice communities,” Bratspies says. “This is a
very different way of thinking about policymaking.”

Sanders, now a member of the Renewable Rikers advisory committee,
offers insights and recommendations from her own and others’
experiences on the island. “We are asking those directly impacted,
‘What do they want it to look like?’” she says. 

A map illustration of Renewable Rikers. _Courtesy of Andrea Johnson
for Regional Plan Association_

Despite facing resistance, activists and policymakers remain committed
to the end of Rikers as we know it. City Council Member Carlina
Rivera, who chairs the council’s Committee on Criminal Justice, is
resolute on the council using its powers to ensure Mayor Adams adheres
to the planned closure. “This administration bears the burden of
demonstrating that they’ve marshaled every possible resource to keep
the plan,” Rivera says. 

At the end of October, the City Council announced the reappointment
of the Independent Rikers Commission
[[link removed]] to ensure that Rikers
shuts down by the mandated August 2027 deadline. The Rikers Commission
2.0 plans to take a renewed look at the current conditions at Rikers
and aims to find the quickest and safest path to closure. 

“It’s the morally right thing to do to close Rikers Island,”
Mack says. “And we hope that we can move forward towards a city that
removes a stain that has harmed generations of Black and Brown New
Yorkers.”

_Claire Greenburger is a journalist, writing about climate justice,
the environment, and mass incarceration. She has a degree in
environmental justice from Middlebury College. She currently works as
an editorial intern at Harper's Magazine. Claire is based in New York
City._

_YES! Media is independent and nonpartisan. Our EXPLANATORY
JOURNALISM analyzes societal problems in terms of their root causes
and explores opportunities for systemic, structural change. Our
stories uncover environmental, economic, and social justice
intersections. Our SOLUTIONS REPORTING spotlights the ideas and
initiatives of people building a better
world. Our COMMENTARIES address dominant economic, political, and
social structures and consider alternative ways of thinking that can
produce a more equitable and Earth-friendly world._

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]