Brooklyn Community Board Says No To City's Jail Plans

DOWNTOWN, BROOKLYN — Brooklyn community board members were finally able to get their stance about the city's plan for a 40-story Atlantic Avenue jail on the books, although a week passed their deadline for doing so.

Community Board 2 voted almost unanimously against the jail, which is part of the city's plan for closing Rikers Island, during its second meeting about the proposal on Wednesday. They join community boards in Queens, the Bronx and Manhattan that also shot down the city's plans for jails in their boroughs.

The vote comes after the board failed to take a stance on the borough-based jail plan during an initial, chaotic meeting that was largely spent trying to quell protesters in the audience.

The proposal has already moved on to the next stage of the review process with Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, but members said both the community board and the borough president felt it was important that Community Board 2 also weighed in on the plans.

"(In the first meeting) we didn't actually make a recommendation that was fit for identifying the position that Community Board 2 took," Chair Lenue Singletary said. "Tonight's item is really about us officially making a recommendation that goes into the record so that Community Board 2 doesn't look absent from the ULURP process."

Wednesday's vote against the 275 Atlantic Avenue jail, which would be one of four in the city meant to replace Rikers, was also a shift from the first meeting, where the board's Land Use Committee had proposed supporting the plan.

In that meeting, the full board narrowly shot down the committee's proposal to say yes to the plan with a long list of conditions, including that the bed count be brought down from 1,437 to 875 and that there be increased training for correction officers.

On Wednesday, the committee said that instead decided to tack these conditions onto a no vote, essentially telling the city what would need to happen to gain their support in the future.

"We feel basically that these things should be taken into account as a whole to decide if and when a future plan will come," Land Use Chair Carlton Gordon said. "But, right now, we...see the current plans the city has given us are not sufficient."

The city's current proposal for Brooklyn would expand the Brooklyn Detention Complex from 815 beds to 1,437 beds. The new detention facility would create 1.2 million gross square feet, including the space for detainees, support space and community or retail space, according to city documents. It is part of Mayor Bill de Blasio's ultimate goal of bringing the incarcerated population down from 7,500 to, most recently, 4,000.

That plan, though, has sparked debate from those who contend that even this number is too high, especially considering recently-passed criminal justice reform. Activists also argue that even if Rikers Island is closed, its "toxic culture" would simply be replicated in the new, borough-based jails.

Community Board 2's three pages of conditions include calls for reducing the Atlantic Avenue jail size, expanding community courts and other youth programs and creating a better training program for corrections officers. It asks that the money left over from reducing the size of the Atlantic Avenue plan go towards affordable housing, education and public health programs.