New York City wants to build a ‘mega jail’ in Chinatown. Residents are fighting back
- A new jail in New York’s Chinatown is expected to stand around 90 metres tall, possibly making it the tallest jail in the world
- Residents urge lawmakers to instead divert funds toward mental health services, affordable housing, and senior care programmes
When Grace Lee headed to a public protest in a corner of New York City’s Chinatown, the mother of three didn’t expect to end up behind bars.
On April 13, Lee and nine others were arrested after forming a human blockade in the street, disrupting the path of construction trucks heading toward the new Chinatown jail site. One of the 10 arrested included Evelyn Yang, wife of former New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang.
“There’s a symbolic irony to being held in jail today while protesting a jail,” Lee, a community advocate running for State Assembly, told Business Insider hours after she was released from police custody.
Over the past four years, Chinatown residents and advocates have been fighting the city’s plans to build a high-rise jail in the neighbourhood, part of its grand scheme to shut down Rikers Island by 2027.
A US$8 billion plan approved by the City Council in 2019 laid out a road map to substitute the infamous Rikers jail complex – a hotbed of violence where detainees are routinely subjected to abuse and fatal neglect- with a network of smaller detention centres.
The idea was that, unlike Rikers, these new jails would be outfitted with state-of-the-art rehabilitation facilities to foster a more “humane” environment for detainees. Moreover, the new jails would be less crowded since they would have a total capacity of 3,300 people with 3,544 beds across the city. Rikers currently houses more than 5,000 detainees.