City Officials To Relocate Teens From Troubled Rikers Island Jail Complex
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- New York City officials say 16- and 17-year-old inmates will be moved off the troubled Rikers Island jail complex and into a Bronx youth facility.
Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the $300 million, four-year plan Thursday. It's subject to land use, planning and community approval.
New York and North Carolina are the only two states that automatically prosecute 16- and 17-year-olds as adults. Legislative efforts to raise the age of criminal responsibility statewide have failed.
Almost all the 188 teens held on Rikers are awaiting trial. That's down from 337 in 2013.
De Blasio says age-appropriate housing will help teens return to the right path.
Federal prosecutors have urged that the teens be moved off Rikers since a 2014 investigation found they were routinely abused.
Rikers was also the subject of a 2016 report highlighting sex abuse problems.
The jail has entrenched problems dealing with sexual abuse, including emergency hotlines that don't work, confidential complaints read by fellow inmates and investigations that don't interview alleged attackers, according to an internal review obtained by The Associated Press.
The report, conducted last year by an outside consultant, also revealed that guards dangerously underestimated the problem, felt helpless to do anything about it and showed "poor professional boundaries" themselves by inappropriately hugging and kissing one another and hanging racy postings in common areas.
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