POLITICS: Brutal crime mistake Mamdani plans to make all over again

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has announced his plans to “responsibly” reduce the population in city jails because of a rise in the jail population, citing a shortage of correction officers and a decline in conditions.

This is all related to the unrealistic and foolhardy move to close Rikers Island.

We’ve seen this movie before.

In 2019, to help speed up the closure of Rikers, the state passed “bail reform,” which led to the release of almost 2,000 career criminals from city jails.

Within 2½ months, by mid-March 2020, crime rose 20% after decades of steady decline.

A month later, in April 2020, the city released another 2,000 inmates from Rikers to control the spread of COVID. These were more violent inmates not eligible for release under bail reform.

By the end of 2020, murders had risen 47%, burglaries were up 42% and shootings doubled over the year before.

It took more than five years for the city to repopulate the jails and bring the crime rate slowly down to “only” about 15% to 20% higher than pre-bail reform.

Now Mamdani wants to release more people from Rikers because, essentially, the city is too incompetent to manage a jail system.

The problem is that the current group of inmates is far worse than the last set they released — and setting them free will only endanger the people of this city even more.

There are currently 5,645 inmates in city jails awaiting trial, 95% of them charged with felonies.

Of those, 1,436, or 25%, are charged with murder; 2,602, or 46%, are charged with violent felony offenses — robbery, burglary, assault, sex offenses, weapons possession and attempted murder.

In other words, 71% of the people held on bail are charged with murder or a violent felony offense.

Another 1,351 of those held on bail, or 24%, are charged with a “non-violent” felony offense — crimes like car theft, commercial burglary, grand larceny, fraud, A-1 felony drugs, and criminal contempt.

Now, mind you, under the new justice “reforms,” most people charged with these “non-violent” felonies cannot have bail set, except in unusual circumstances.

These must be unique people under New York law for a judge to even consider setting bail for their non-violent felony offenses.

They must have committed a crime while out on probation or parole for another crime, or had two or more prior felony convictions, or harmed someone while released on a pending prior charge of harming someone else.

Then there are 271 misdemeanor defendants being held on bail pre-trial.

About the only way bail can be set on a misdemeanor is if the defendant has multiple open cases.

The rest of the current Rikers population includes 166 state-sentenced convicts awaiting transfer to state prison, 239 felons who have been violated on parole, and 571 who have been sentenced to jail for less than a year.

These are seriously maladjusted people.

But perhaps the most persuasive evidence of the danger of the defendants now being held on bail in New York City is that bail was set at all by a New York City judge.

In short: People aren’t in Rikers because of jaywalking or minor drug possession. They aren’t there because New York is too tough on crime.

They are there because they are dangerous, and locking them up makes the city safer for everyone.

Yet Democrats still cling to a plan to close Rikers and squeeze a maximum of 4,400 criminals into soon-to-be-constructed borough-based jail cells.

The pressure to release defendants to enact that plan will become even greater — and crime will rise.

City leaders will blame that increase on the next pandemic, sunspots, maybe President Trump.

If they were honest, they’d admit that they are willing to accept the rise in crime and increased victims to meet their goal of closing Rikers.

But they won’t.

For when it comes to closing Rikers Island, New York City is an incredibly unserious place.

The new Department of Corrections commissioner says the city’s jails are operating at 92% capacity — “the highest in more than a decade.”

Of course they are — because the city closed so many jail facilities over the past few years, concentrating the remaining prisoners in fewer buildings.

Our politicians claim it costs from $330,000 to $550,000 a year to house each prisoner in NYC jails.

Yet the average cost of housing prisoners in New York’s state prisons is only $115,000 a year, the state’s non-NYC county jails average $82,000 a year, and the median cost to house a prisoner in jails across the United States is $40,000.

Even the federal government spends only about $60,000 per inmate.

But rather than opening a grand jury investigation into why NYC spends such a ridiculous (if true) amount, or finding ways to house city inmates in state jail cells, they’ll release thousands of dangerous, mentally ill, drug-addicted career criminal inmates onto our city’s streets once again, using their misleading statistics and ideologically driven studies to justify it.

Then they’ll tell you the inevitable resultant crime rise is unrelated to these releases.

They are not telling you the truth.

And the citizens of this once-safe city will, once again, bear the cost — the ultimate tragedy.

Jim Quinn is a retired career prosecutor in the Queens District Attorney’s Office, where he served for 42 years.