Brooklyn House of Detention Could Grow So That Rikers Can Close: Reports

DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN — City Councilman Stephen Levin will consider expanding the Brooklyn House of Detention to help Mayor Bill de Blasio shut down Rikers Island in 10 years’ time, according to reports.

“There’s a capacity for jails in our Downtown area,” Levin said of the Atlantic Avenue facility in an interview with the Brooklyn Paper. “And we’ve learned through the reopening that having a facility there isn’t terribly onerous to the surrounding community.”

Levin’s declaration came one week after de Blasio asked city council members, during an interview on the Brian Lehrer show, to accept more inmates in their local jails.

De Blasio’s plan calls on decreasing Rikers’ population — from about 9,500 to 5,000 in the next 10 years — with justice system reforms, but also with boroughwide prison expansions.

Levin argued that the Brooklyn House of Detention, which currently hosts just 466 inmates, would be a strong candidate for expansion because of its close proximity to the downtown Brooklyn courthouses in his two interviews with The Brooklyn Paper and DNAinfo New York.

“When you think about the amount of money we waste transporting prisoners between Rikers and the courts in Brooklyn,,” Levin said in his DNAinfo interview, "that is truly wasteful spending."

Potential challenges, Levin admitted, would be pushback from the community that successfully quashed a plan to expand the prison’s capacity to 1,5000 beds in 2012 and completing renovations to a complex suffering from “ a lot of wear and tear.”

“This is all hypothetical because there hasn’t been anything presented yet,” he said in his DNAinfo interview. “And I’m not sure when that will happen.”

Photo courtesy of GoogleMaps/Nov. 2016