By Joe Hirsch
joehirsch6@yahoo.com
Barely a month after scuttling its plan to build a 2000-bed jail in Hunts Point, the Department of Correction is set to try again, this time on city-owned property adjacent to the Fulton fish market.
In a letter to Community Board 2 chair Roberto Garcia, Correction Commissioner Martin Horn said he wanted to present the department’s new proposal to the board.
The March 18 letter says the new plan calls for 25 percent fewer beds and “includes elements in response to community concerns.
Horn told the city’s Committee on Fire and Criminal Justice Services on March 14 that he is also “prepared to consider removing the jail barge upon completion of the new 1500-bed jail,”in response to the complaints of elected officials and South Bronx residents that Hunts Point is already host to too many correctional facilities. Garcia responded by recommending a public forum be held soon in Hunts Point to allow residents to hear the proposal, and to weigh in with their reactions.
At the end of February, the city dropped its previous plan to build a jail at a 28-acre industrial site in the former Oak Point rail yard, after being stymied by legal battles with the site’s owner and opposition from elected officials and a well-organized coalition of local residents calling itself Community in Unity.Community in Unity held frequent rallies and gatherings to inform the community about the plan, and to get local residents involved, from the time Horn announced his plans publicly in October 2006.
Nearly 50 members of Community in Unity attended a meeting of Board 2’s Economic Development Committee on April 10 to voice their continued opposition to the new proposal, which the group learned about from sources in the mayorís office.The meeting sometimes grew testy, as various members of the group urged board members not only to oppose the city’s new jail plan, as it had the earlier plan, but to do so more vocally.
Members of Community in Unity stressed that their antagonism to the idea of a new jail is not limited to the Oak Point site.
“A jail is a jail is a jail, and it doesn’t matter whether they put it at Oak Point, or at Hunts Point or at Southern Boulevard,” said Lisa Ortega, one of the group’s organizers. “If you’re for it you’re for it, if you’re against it, you’re against it.”
A resident who calls himself Free read a letter to the board, citing environmental hazards in Hunts Point, as well as the project’s $375 million price tag. The organization contends the money would be better spent on inmate re-entry, job preparation and other social programs.
The city says it needs new jail beds to replace beds in deteriorating facilities at Rikers Island, and argues that building in the Bronx will bring inmates closer to lawyers, to the courts and to friends and family who want to visit them.
But Community in Unity countered that a new jail would increase traffic on the area’s already-congested streets.
“There’s already an enormous amount of buses coming in and out from that area, from the barge,” Free said. “Now just imagine having a 2,000-bed jail put in that area, and imagine 20 or 30 more buses going from whatever other jail, whatever other court that they have to come from.”The Hunts Point-based environmental group Sustainable South Bronx organized a public event at MS 201 on April 15 to rally the public to insist government create jobs rather than build a new jail. Local hip-hop musicians performed, and Reverend Lenox Yearwood of the Washington DC-based grass roots organization Hip Hop Caucus (http://www.hiphopcaucus.org/about.htm#www) encouraged the hundred-plus in attendance to oppose the jail-building proposal.
Yearwood also touched on global warming and the disproportionate imprisonment of Latinos and blacks nationwide.
“If they continue to build jails in our communities without giving us jobs and dealing with our climate, all will be lost,” Yearwood said, then added, “what happens here will affect the entire country.”