Six teams of development and construction companies have been selected to bid to develop the four borough-based jails planned to replace the infamous and inhumane Rikers Island, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Wednesday.
Hizzoner released his “Roadmap to Closing Rikers Island” in 2017, with an end goal of closing the sprawling jail complex by 2016 and replacing it, and three other city detention centers, with four smaller jails in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx. Existing jails in the boroughs did not have enough space to accommodate the roughly 10,000 people detained at Rikers in 2016.
