Manhattan Borough Based Jail Update: Response to the Lippman Commission’s Recent Report
On March 19, 2025, the Independent Rikers Commission led by Hon. Jonathan Lippman released A Path Forward: The Blueprint to Close Rikers. The following statement from Welcome to Chinatown and Neighbors United Below Canal is in response to the report.
The release of the Lippman Commission’s March 2025 report confirms what many in Chinatown feared: our community’s concerns continue to be minimized in the broader conversation about closing Rikers Island. We recognize that under the law, Rikers must close by 2027, and our community has engaged in good faith to support that mandate. But closing Rikers cannot come at the expense of another historically marginalized community.
The report reiterates the City’s commitment to constructing a jailscraper at 125 White Street—despite it being the most complex and burdensome site of all four borough-based facilities. Last year, Neighbors United Below Canal, Welcome to Chinatown, and other community stakeholders met with the Lippman Commission to express our concerns about the Manhattan Borough Based Jail in its current plan. The Manhattan site is located atop fragile soil over the historic Collect Pond, in one of the densest residential neighborhoods in New York City, directly adjacent to senior housing and community-serving institutions. It is a location that raises unique engineering, environmental, health, and displacement risks. None of these concerns are meaningfully addressed in the Commission’s recommendations.
Though the report outlines important reforms to safely reduce the jail population, it still asserts that the scale of the proposed jail must remain unchanged. This contradiction undermines the very logic of decarceration. If investments in mental health care, addiction services, and alternatives to incarceration are successful, then the City must also re-evaluate its carceral infrastructure accordingly.
The Commission gestures toward accountability by urging the City to revisit the Points of Agreement from 2019. Those commitments, including community transparency, mitigation investments, and independent monitoring, must not be treated as afterthoughts. Further, the notion that the Points of Agreement should somehow placate, appease, make up for or make better the transgressions that this marginalized community has to bear is misguided and insufficient. We feel strongly that conversations need to be reopened to ensure the Chinatown community’s concerns and needs are not only properly heard but addressed. At a minimum, all of this is a baseline requirement, not a consolation prize.
Chinatown’s economic and cultural resilience has been tested time and again—by 9/11, by Hurricane Sandy, by COVID-19, and now by the threat of a massive carceral facility that risks compounding long-standing harm. If the City is serious about equitable reform, then it must start by listening. It must recognize that true public safety includes the health, stability, and future of communities like ours.
We will continue to advocate for alternative solutions— including an alternative site and a smaller jail— for independent oversight, for the needs of our community and for real transparency. And we will continue to ensure that the future of Chinatown is not decided without us.
Click the button below to view the presentation presented to the Lippman Commission by Welcome to Chinatown & Neighbors United Below Canal in May 2024. The report illustrates the concerns around the viability of the current site for the Manhattan Borough Based Jail at 125 White Street, and proposes a smaller jail for NYC to meet its criminal justice reform goals in a safer, faster, and more cost efficient way.
