The Jailscraper vs. Chinatown: NYC Residents Fight Construction of World's Tallest Jail

this is democracy Now democraticnow.org The War and Peace report I'm Amy Goodman as we look now at the

fight

to stop the

construction

of what could be the

world

's

tallest

prison in Manhattan's Chinatown neighborhood, the so-called 300-foot prison height. Scraper or Mega Jail would be one third the height of the Empire State Building. It is one of four new

jail

s that are part of a plan to replace the city's famous Rikers Island

jail

, where 18 prisoners have died this year alone. The Marshall Project reports that the district. The jail-based plan focuses on

construction

near courthouses and would feature jails intended to be more cited.

Human opponents of the $8 billion plan, including the No New Prisons Coalition, say the city should instead invest in non-corral violence prevention, harm reduction and crisis management. In addition to the Manhattan jail scraper, the city's plan includes new jails in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, excluding predominantly white and conservative Staten Island. Chinatown is one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City, with more than a quarter of

residents

living in poverty, including a third. Hundreds of seniors in Mark March snaked through the busy streets of Chinatown and formed a human chain to protest the jail. This is a clip from the short documentary jail scraper versus Chinatown by award-winning filmmaker John Alpert, co-founder of DCTV, which has been located. in Chinatown for half a century, the ancient home of democracy Now the direct action was organized by the neighbors United under the Canal this is the co-founder who will join us in a minute we will not let them put up these fences we are going to defend Chinatown we are going to do this Civil Disobedience to block this truck, everyone sit down, the company that comes to Chinatown to profit from the construction of this jail or the demolition of these two jails is not welcome in Chinatown, Little Italy, it is not welcome. here people first there are no new prisons people first there are no new prisons people first there are no new prisons we are Community we are doing it for our elderly people right behind you is a singer Living Center we are doing it for them we are doing it for him

residents

12,000 letters written to Mayor Adams against this jail we have not heard any response from his administration how dare he even respect his constituents?

Protesters mentioned that New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who took office in January, has continued to support the prison plan he inherited from Mayor Bill de Blasio even though Adams promised to stop it when he was on the campaign trail. This is then-candidate Eric Adams speaking in April 2021 in Chinatown. I know this community well as a police officer. I was assigned to this community. I know how much they have endured and so if we want to stop the thoughtlessness of what this community has experienced with the recent level of hate crimes, let's stop the institutionalization of hate that we are seeing in a crazy government, there is no new jails, don't build a jail in this place we can do a better job then it's the candidate uh Eric Adams over the weekend construction heated up on the scraper trail in Chinatown even as the opposition continues just before going to broadcast the Filmmaker John Alpert recorded this update from DC TV's Mike Kimber is just a few feet from the jail for the jail and our basement was flooded with water and mud in the basement because this is a low point on the block and our entire basement was flooded by the construction of the jail because yeah, for the construction of the jail that's the reason they broke this is because of the jail and they just put this new street dial in August for the summer streets and they broke everything to support democracy .

Now they invaded the mayor's office to join us, they sent us this statement quote. All four prison sites are currently undergoing demolition to remove existing structures or prompt Preparation to prepare for construction. We continue to carry out the municipal jail program every day. They wrote well for more. We are joined by three guests, Jan Lee, who just In that video you hear the co-founder of Vecinos Unidos Beneath the Channel Christopher Marte is a member of the New York City Council who represents District One which includes Chinatown, he has been in the protests and John Alpert, who has one and more Emmy Awards than we can count, is a journalist. and documentary filmmaker co-founder and CEO of DCTV together with keikotsuna, we welcome everyone to democracy.

Now, um, Jan, let's start with you, Jen Lee, you've been

fight

ing this prison scraper, we're talking about a prison that would be the

tallest

in the

world

. world what participation does the community have what did he have in this and what does Tierra Rota have well we have to be we have to make a distinction here it is not a prison it is a jail this is intended for preventive detention and in the short term it stays, let's be clear about the Chinatown history, we've had a jail on that site since 1838, so we're very familiar with how the city, under different administrations, has torn down jails and built larger ones in their place and each time they've built a bigger one, They are just as dysfunctional as those who came before them, so what we are saying is that we are in a unique position as a community that has fully accepted our part in creating a more humane environment for those who are incarcerated.

It is very important to understand that we are By accepting this, what we are not accepting is the sacrifice because this is a very dangerous area to build a prison 350 300 is 350 feet high, the highest in the world. Also, the mass of this building is a couple of blocks in each direction, so we still don't know what it looks like. The plans have not been revealed, they will not be revealed for quite some time because this is a design. to build a project so contrary to what a lot of people say about Chinatown being NIMBY, we are not at all, we completely embrace envy, you mean not in my backyard, yeah yeah, and that's just an unfair characterization of our fight that has continued. since 2018, about the jail, these two jails are being torn down and a new mega jail is being built in their place, we're actually sitting, Chinatown is on the largest jail footprint probably on the entire east coast of the United States with each court represented one federal prison and two municipal prisons John Albert, yes, you just filmed Mike Kimber outside DCTV, a place we know well and have broadcast from for years, explain what is happening right next to you and what they have told you.

How are you preparing for this prison construction? Is it a consummate destiny? Well, the city is rushing to you, you know, the city is rushing to do Theta Complete because if they can tear something down, then it's too late to do what we're going to do. What we are suggesting is to adapt the current prisons to the ones we have now and modernize them, which will be much cheaper. You know, this is an instructive thing between Chris and I, it's the part of the Empire State Building that is the exact size of the jail they're trying to build.

The Empire State Building cost around 40 million dollars just to tear down what they are doing now. 250 million dollars they have, they have not built any homes, when was the last time? They built houses in our neighborhood in 35 years, okay, no new hospitals, schools are lost, all the money we need to spend to provide opportunities for people is spent on iron bars and it is spent on a building that no one has seen never anything like that. this before and it's a pork barrel, it's an absolute pork barrel, it's kind of ironic that it's right down the street from the Tweed Courthouse, but this makes a Tweed Courthouse look like a small tent .

You're talking about Boss Tweed, the famously corrupt New York politician. York City, well Christopher Marty, you're the New York City Councilman representing the district, what do you understand now? This is going to be a third of the height of the Empire State Building or as tall as the Empire State Building and what a turnout, are you an elected representative? Does your community have? Yes, so it will be a third of the Empire State Building and as Jan mentioned for the last four years, we have been organizing testimony, including suing the city to stop the construction of the world's tallest jail and leaders in our community like Jan and I have met with management several times throughout this year to convince them of adaptive reuse right now on Rikers Island, almost every month we hear about another death that I hear about the inhumane nature that is happening there.

We have a plan that will allow you to adaptively repurpose the two current jails to house these people much faster, closer to the court, and closer to their families. Furthermore, this will almost save the city. A billion dollars right now is over budget when it comes to the construction and demolition of this site, so we have a plan that is supported by our entire community, as Jan said, we have lived with this ecosystem for decades and we want to do I'm sure the city listens to us and we will continue to fight to make sure we are heard so Rikers but you don't support what has been done as an alternative if you can explain what John Albert just said about where the money is.

I spent in the city, for example, the issue of Housing and hospitals, health care and the two prisons that you are talking about are the two prisons that are there right now and one of them should be called like the Bernard Carrick detention complex up to Bernard Carrick the former police commissioner was imprisoned and then in jail and then they took down that banner yeah and now it's called Tombs which is very ironic to me this is personal my brother was in and out of Rikers Island growing up . I have been there several times. I took my nephew there when he was a kid and saw the inhumane nature for everyone involved in that and right now with the construction of this new Mega Jail the city didn't even release the plans. of what the programming will look like and throughout this entire process there has been no transparency or accountability, it has taken us as a community to develop our own plan to build a much more humane project that will save money faster. and get people off Rikers Island much faster, so we've been pushing this plan to make sure that we can have a say in this process, so in general there used to be a lot more community groups that were openly opposed to this , What happened?

Well, Neighbors United Under the Canal was formed with Chris, myself and a few other community leaders as an information clearinghouse because the information we get from the city involved in the uniform land use review process is extremely complex and the community partners we partner with have I used nubc as the front face of this opposition, but we should also look towards the positive nature of what adaptive reuse can be and why people should support it. We are facing not a renewal. A renovation is just a superficial, rudimentary redo of something that "We're talking about a complete dismantling of these buildings down to the steel beams and rebuilding these buildings with more efficient use of space, all up to code and turning it into a beautiful and more humane for the people who will be inside us.

We're also looking at something that could be a shining beacon for the future of New York City and Lower Manhattan to look at how we've taken what used to be failed policies since 1838 over and over again there and really created something that the neighborhood We could be proud and still keep a building safe without having to dig many feet into what is essentially a swamp and what they have experienced on DC TV is that it floods well, that is because the water table is very close to the surface. it's not an area where you want to build a jail scraper it's not an area where the ground is stable we will destabilize

chinatown

both psychologically economically financially we are still hot on the heels of many other disasters like 9/11 and hurricane sandy and of course the World crisis. pandemic, we must also remember that this plan was planned in 2017, when things were very different, we are facing a global pandemic that has pushed back the costs of building the supply chain and don't we want to be greener?

Shouldn't we tear down buildings and throw them in landfills? There's a way to do it that the rest of the world has really embraced, which is adaptive reuse, and I really think we can expect a win-win situation. For both the administration, the detainees, and the neighborhood that will not be subject to these years of demolition and construction, we can get people into safer environments much faster, which is why John Alford took the land and the bridge between the two buildings. below, are there permissions for thisdestruction? How are they informed about all this in the community? Then, they knocked out the windows of the bridge.

As we came up here today, they had the instruments of destruction ready to strike. tear it down, they are trying to tear something down as fast as they can so that it is the consummate destiny and they have to tear down the entire building, but the sad situation is that there is no rationality involved, no one thinks what is really best for the city is how much money they can spend as fast as possible this is the perfect definition of pork barrel no one is thinking about judicial justice they put the sheepskin of judicial justice on this project it is just pork barrel and it is to divert money unfortunately away from What our city ​​really needs in iron bars is as regressive as anything that has been done in the history of New York City and it is shocking that some of the political leaders agree with this, but you know one of the things that was done was a lot of corruption Amy and the people who should have opposed this were bought off, they are doing everything they can to build this jail Chris Martin, do you know it is possible to change this?

Yeah, regarding permits, there are no permits to demolish these demo buildings, just a bridge and as we saw, we had a few weeks ago there, uh, Chris Marte, John Albert and Jen Lee. I'm Amy Goodman, thanks for joining us.