Rikers Island must be shut down by 2027, according to a city law enacted during the de Blasio Adminstration in 2019. However, those running this November to be the next NYC mayor aren’t so sure that deadline will be met.
The four mayoral candidates expressed concern over Rikers Island, but also doubted its ability to fulfill the closure mandate due in 2027, about 18 months after the new term begins on Jan. 1, 2026. All but one of them think the correctional facility should be permanently shuttered; Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa said he would seek to keep it open and challenge the law requiring its closure.
A city law mandates closing Rikers Island by 2027 and replacing the penitentiary with four smaller, borough-based jails, although it’s not clear whether that will occur. The community jail plan has been met with heavy resistance from local residents, and just two of the sites are presently under construction.
Meanwhile, the next mayor’s ability to manage Rikers Island will be under even more scrutiny than their predecessors.
That’s because Rikers Island has been placed under federal receivership under the order of Judge Laura Taylor Swain, who held the city in contempt for violence and conditions on Rikers Island — specifically “the ongoing violations of the constitutional rights of people in custody in the New York City jails.”
Swain will soon appoint a “remediation manager” to ensure that the violations are corrected to the court’s satisfaction, making the Department of Correction (DOC), which operates Rikers, directly accountable to them.
And as Rikers Island’s future remains very much in doubt, inmates at the facility are dying at an alarming clip. The Correction Department reported 12 in-custody deaths so far in 2025, almost all of them inside Rikers. The string of deaths has raised further concerns about conditions on the island, increased anger among advocates who want Rikers closed for good, and made the future of the facility and policies for detaining suspected criminals an even more important topic in the 2025 NYC mayor’s race.
Here’s where each of the candidates stands on Rikers Island’s future.
Zohran Mamdani
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks to the media during a campaign stop with Speaker of the New York State Assembly Carl Heastie in the Bronx borough of New York City, U.S., September 17, 2025. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
The Mamdani campaign said “Rikers Island’s decades-long history of abuse, neglect and suffering has no place in New York City.”
“As Mayor, Zohran Mamdani will work to adhere to the 2027 closure of Rikers as required by law, a commitment the Adams administration has abandoned and set back by years,” the campaign said.
Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and current frontrunner in the race, spoke more at length at Columbia University on Sept. 8 about what he perceives to be problems at Rikers and possible solutions.
“The despair on Rikers Island has been well known to many of us for quite some time,” he told the Columbia Journalism School. “And yet it is despair that has only been heightened under this current administration.”
Mamdani said the Rikers jail population has increased by more than 1,000 since Mayor Adams took office and that it’s possible to reduce it to less than 4,000 and as low as 3,700.
He also said at Columbia that, after delays and a lack of action, it is “functionally impossible” to close it by 2027.
“There’s a question of will,” Mamdani said. “Do you actually want to do this or are you just pushing the can down the road?”
He said the average stay in Rikers has increased from 50 days in the 1990s to more than 100 days and called for speedy trials and court reforms.
His campaign also cited a need to crack down on the human rights abuses taking place there, such as deadlocking in which inmates are locked in their cells for weeks, as well as sexual assault and excessive use of force.
“No longer can we just be at ease with Rikers Island being the largest mental health facility in New York City,” Mamdani said, saying that 40% of those released from New York City jails enter shelters.
Eric Adams
Mayor Eric Adams on a tour of Rikers Island in June 2022.NYC Mayoral Photography Unit
Mayor Eric Adams, meanwhile, told News 12 on Sept. 22 that he has concerns over Mamdani’s desire to reduce the Rikers population.
“When you stand for and believe that you should remove 3,000 people from Rikers Island, who are some of the most dangerous people in our city, they’re going to go back to the communities that they preyed on in the first place,” said Adams, a Democrat now seeking re-election as an independent candidate.
In 2021, while campaigning to become the city’s next mayor, Adams expressed support for closing Rikers. However, while mayor a year later, he expressed doubt that the city could meet the mandated 2027 closure deadline because of the large numbers of violent criminals incarcerated there.
The next year, 2023, he called upon the City Council to revisit the closure plan altogether, noting the increased population at the facility. The population rose from 5,700 when Adams took office to more than 7,000 inmates today.
At the same time, the DOC has reported at least 45 in-custody deaths on Rikers Island since 2022.
When Rikers officially fell into federal receivership in May, the mayor said that “the problems on Rikers are decades in the making” and did not begin with his administration.
Adams blamed the Rikers Island closure plan, which the City Council and then Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration approved in 2019, for allegedly preventing the city from investing in capital improvements there.
In 2022, the Adams administration and the current federal Rikers Island monitor, Steve Martin, agreed on an action plan to improve conditions. The plan promised what the administration called at the time “meaningful reform” at the prison, including efforts to reduce violence and increase staffing.
While acknowledging that Correction Commissioner Lynette Maginley-Liddle has been “working collaboratively with the monitor to move the agency forward and committed to reform” in recent years, her actions alone were not enough for Swain to “to tip this factor against the appointment of a receiver.”
Andrew Cuomo
Former Gov. Andrew CuomoREUTERS/Adam Gray
A spokesman for former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, running as an independent after losing the Democratic primary in June to Mamdani, said he “has sought the closing of Rikers for more than a decade.”
“The current plan has been mismanaged and dragged down by incompetence,” the spokesman said. “There’s no way those jails are going to be completed by 2027, and everyone needs to go back to the drawing board with a real plan that has to be managed.”
Focusing much of his attention on the fate of mentally-ill inmates, in June, Cuomo said he would relocate people with serious mental illness from Rikers Island to supportive housing within the first 30 days of his administration.
Cuomo, at the time, called the troubled jail complex “an absurd disgrace and abuse of taxpayers” and vowed to move non-violent detainees with significant mental health needs into community-based group homes and treatment facilities. He did not specify how many people would qualify or outline logistics beyond the 30-day timeframe.
Under his proposal, only individuals who are not charged with violent crimes and are not considered a danger to others would be eligible for transfer.
In March, a report by the Independent Rikers Commission found that of the 6,800 inmates, 57% of the jail population has a mental illness, including 83% of women. Around 1,400 detainees, or 21%, are classified as having a serious mental illness.
Curtis Sliwa
Republican mayoral nominee Curtis Sliwa speaking in Union Square on Sept. 19, 2025.Photo by Jonathan Portee
Sliwa said he would keep Rikers open, but that it needs to be adapted.
“I want it to be rehabbed and redeveloped,” Sliwa said, “both the occupied buildings and the empty ones.”
Sliwa said some of those currently being held there with mental health issues can be put in a specialized unit “where they can get the care and attention that their mental health demands before they get released back into the community.”
“I would challenge the 2027 deadline in court,” Sliwa added. “I am opposed to the community jails, which are a waste of money and resources.”
He said that money could be better used “for affordable housing,” adding that a community-based jail plan originally set to cost $8 billion now is set to cost $16 billion.
“It seems that it will only continue to increase and waste taxpayers’ dollars,” Sliwa said. “The desire to close Rikers Island is also being promoted by developers who want to put up high-rise complexes. Follow the money. Always follow the money.”