Borough-Based Jails Run $5 Billion Over Budget as 2027 Rikers Deadline Slips Further

New York’s multibillion-dollar plan to shutter Rikers Island and build borough jails illustrates the city’s struggle to align ideals of justice reform with the unruly realities of bureaucracy, budgets, and crime trends.

In the annals of ambitious municipal undertakings, few rival New York City’s effort to close Rikers Island, a place infamous enough to have “a stain on the history of this city,” as Mayor Zohran Mamdani put it during his reelection campaign. The project to replace the sprawling jail complex—the subject of decades of litigation and scandal—with four smaller, ostensibly kinder jails scattered through Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx was meant to herald a fresh era in criminal justice. Instead, it has become a case study in administrative drift and ballooning costs.

The city promised to shutter Rikers by August 2027. Instead, not one of the replacement jails will be ready by then; Brooklyn’s will be the first to open, and not until 2029. Manhattan’s new facility, which replaces the community-adored but threadbare Chinatown jail, will be last, with a completion date sometime in the distant 2030s. Construction crews, perhaps mindful of city contracts’ notorious unpredictability, are nevertheless at work. In Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill, the massive steel skeleton of the new jail now looms over Atlantic Avenue, with its framework scheduled for completion in April. Yet even here, the project ambles toward a finish line years behind schedule.

This temporal slippage ought to worry not only advocates of humane incarceration but also City Hall bean counters. The original price tag for the new facilities was $8.7 billion, already a sum that would make a sober accountant blush. But as of 2024, the estimate stands at $13.7 billion—a princely 57% increase, blamed on construction cost inflation, regulatory labyrinths, and the byzantine politics of neighborhood opposition. Queens’ jail alone will cost $4 billion for a 1.1-million-square-foot building at Kew Gardens, with only early utility work set to begin this summer.

The mismatch between aspiration and capacity does not end with bricks and mortar. The four new jails are designed for a combined population of 4,160 inmates—a “right-sized” number intended to reflect falling crime rates and rising investments in pretrial diversion. But the actual number of those incarcerated at Rikers has not obliged these actuarial hopes. As of early 2024, Rikers houses roughly 6,700 people, a figure that shows scant sign of shrinking, and may well rise if the city’s crime reduction efforts continue to falter.

Borough-based jails were sold as a more enlightened approach: smaller facilities that keep the incarcerated near their families, their legal representation, and their communities. Stanley Richards, the city’s correction commissioner, argues that this proximity “strengthens fairness and connection throughout the process.” These goals, while laudable, still risk running aground on political and practical terrain as fractious as any the city faces. No neighborhood has welcomed a jail with open arms; Chinatown, in particular, has staged pitched protests and lawsuits. Staten Island, alone among the boroughs, will remain blissfully jail-free—a feat achieved more by exertion of local influence than by persuasive policy rationale.

Crucially, as construction bills pile up, public faith in the plan seems to waver. Many New Yorkers, still rattled by memories of pandemic-era crime spikes, are in no rush to trade Rikers for new jails that some fear may quickly overflow. Political winds may blow in the opposite direction: a new administration could, in theory, freeze or abandon the project, pointing to its mounting costs and eroding perceived public safety.

Yet the status quo at Rikers is hard to defend. The island’s crumbling infrastructure and long history of violence, suicides, and federal intervention render it a potent symbol of criminal justice failure. Dallying over reform incurs not just financial costs but human ones—the sort often measured in lawsuits and lost lives.

Wider lessons from New York’s jail tangle

Other cities have not been spared similar headaches, though few have attempted so dramatic a move. Los Angeles, which embarked on reducing its own jail population and rebuilding facilities, has also encountered sky-high costs and fierce community opposition. Nationally, criminal justice reformers are watching New York’s predicament with a wary eye: if the city cannot build its way out of Rikers’ ignominy, can any metropolis truly fix its jails?

There are international parallels—Norway and the Netherlands have touted low incarceration rates and comparatively humane jail designs for years. Their success, however, stems less from prefabricated cells and more from deep investments in social services and a political consensus on rehabilitation over retribution. New York, with its ever-shifting politics and kaleidoscopic population, offers a tougher proving ground.

Some sense can still be made of the squandered billions: construction delays and cost overruns, while galling, are far from unique to jails. Any public megaproject—be it a stadium, subway, or school—must run the gauntlet of city procurement rules, neighborhood objections, and the eternal temptation among mayors to announce deadlines that edge stealthily into fantasy.

The larger question is whether New York’s willingness to endure short-term fiscal pain and logistical cavalry charges will, in the end, yield a correctional system both more humane and more efficient. We reckon there are grounds for optimism, though not of the giddy sort. Smaller jails near courthouses and communities do improve certain outcomes—intimation of justice, at least, if not its full delivery. Cost, while extraordinary, may in time dwindle next to the unsustainable burden of lawsuits, maintenance, and federal monitoring at Rikers.

Eventually, the city will be forced to reconcile its ambitions with its hard realities: rising costs, an insufficiently shrinking jail population, political blowback, and the wrenching fact that building new jails is, by any measure, less popular than not building them. We suspect the result will be as messy and imperfect as the city itself, but a modest improvement over the catastrophe of Rikers.

In the end, New York’s borough-based jail saga is both a warning and a guide. Bureaucracy, public misgivings, and financial sprawl may slow reform, but do not erase its necessity. And while there is small glory in tardy or costly progress, it still beats permanent stasis. ■