By Joe Hirsch
news@huntspointexpress.com
Dozens of residents and activists from Hunts Point and Longwood took to the steps of City Hall in a rain-soaked mid-December rally to denounce the city’s continued plans to construct a new $500 million jail in the neighborhood.New York Governor David Paterson’s recently proposed massive cuts to the state budget triggered the rally. The city, too, is struggling to close a budget gap with a combination of cuts and new taxes. Opponents of the jail contrasted the hit that health care and education were taking to the half-billion-dollar expenditure proposed for the jail.
“Five hundred million dollars to build a jail when the city is in a deficit is completely absurd,” said Lisa Ortega of the organization Rights for Imprisoned People with Psychiatric Disabilities, and a member of the South Bronx citizen’s coalition Community in Unity.
In 2005, citizens from the area formed the coalition when the city first announced its plans to build a 2000-bed jail on the peninsula. The group pressured Bronx politicians to oppose the initiative.
Faced with public outcry, political opposition and a legal challenge from the site’s owner, the Department of Corrections last year abandoned its plans to build the new jail on 28 acres on the waterfront in the Oak Point rail yard.
Soon after, however, the city announced plans to build a 1500-bed jail on city-owned land next to the Fulton Fish Market, near the jail barge and a short distance from Oak Point. The Department of Corrections contends a new jail is needed to replace decrepit jail cells at Riker’s Island that will soon be demolished, and that local residents would have an easier time commuting to a South Bronx jail to visit their loved ones, rather than trekking to Riker’s.
“This is our second round with the city and the Department of Corrections,” Ortega said. “We fought them and we won. It’s not going to be easy. We intend to fight them” again, she said.
“With all the budget information that came down from the state,” said Kellie Terry Sepulveda, executive managing director of the Point Community Development Corporation, “it is an opportunity for the city to reflect on the investment of our tax dollars.”
She asked, “What will we get out of investing $500 million in tax revenue into a system that we know to be adding to the social degradation of our neighborhoods,” adding that Bronx politicians are on record as continuing to oppose a new jail in the area. Rafael Mutis of the Seven-Neighborhood Action Partnership connected the unwillingness of the city to take local concerns into account with the federal government’s recent bailouts of New York-based investment firms.
“We see how on Wall Street they’re robbing us blind,” said Mutis, whose organization advocates for the elimination of minimum mandatory sentencing for non-violent drug users, who called the plan to build a new jail “a continual waste of taxpayer’s money.”
“We have four (jails) already,” said Hunts Point resident Lucinda Ortiz. “Four is enough for any community. Why you want to give us another one? Is that all you can say to our children, that we’re going to give you another jail?”
A number of speakers insisted Mayor Bloomberg and Corrections Commissioner Martin Horn should sit down with the jail’s opponents, saying they have urged City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to pressure the mayor into a meeting.