A new unit is opening at Bellevue Hospital to house Rikers Island detainees with serious medical needs, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Tuesday.
The mayor said the $241 million facility will help improve care for those in custody while also inching the city closer to its goal of closing the troubled jail complex.
The 104-bed Bellevue unit was completed last year, but the first patients will be moving in on Wednesday, city officials said. The opening comes as the city faces increased scrutiny over mounting jail deaths.
“For decades, the daily conditions at Rikers have been calamitous and unsafe,” Mamdani said at a press conference at Bellevue. “Two weeks ago, two men suffered medical emergencies and died while in [Department of Correction] custody. These are not isolated incidents.”
Another 15 people died in city custody last year. In a November report on the 2025 deaths, the Board of Correction, which acts as a watchdog for the Department of Correction, recommended a number of fixes, including improved supervision and more prompt medical aid for those who are sick or injured.
The new Bellevue unit will make it so that those in need of specialty care at Rikers don’t have to travel for hours to get to a hospital, Mamdani said. But the unit is only designed to help a fraction of the jail population in need of medical services. City officials said that will include those with illnesses such as cancer and congestive heart failure.
Department of Correction Commissioner Stanley Richards thanked the mayor and other city officials for pushing forward the opening of the new Bellevue unit, which he hailed for its modern, “thoughtful design.”
The facility features new physical and occupational therapy equipment, natural light and a “vast recreational space,” according to Mamdani.
The mayor said two more similar units are planned for North Central Bronx Hospital and Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn, which are slated to be completed by the end of 2029. The three units will be able to house 340 detainees in total.
Some of those moving into the new Bellevue unit will be coming from the North Infirmary Command, an aging medical unit at Rikers that the city is planning to close.
But many of the 300 or so detainees in that Rikers unit will be moved elsewhere in the jail complex because they don’t need the level of care being offered at Bellevue, officials said.
Mamdani said closing the NIC is one step toward the ultimate goal of closing Rikers Island, but he acknowledged there’s a lot more work to be done to reduce the jail population. Rikers currently houses some 7,000 New Yorkers — many of whom are awaiting trial — whereas the borough-based jails being constructed to replace the complex will be able to hold about 4,000.
Mamdani said meeting the deadline the City Council set in 2019 to close Rikers by next year will be “practically impossible,” blaming that, in part, on the prior administration’s “lack of interest” in working toward the closure.
