As New York City barrels toward a legally mandated shutdown of Rikers Island after years of delays and fierce opposition, the Mamdani administration has tapped a key architect and booster of the original plan to help see it through.
Dana Kaplan, who helped coordinate the city’s blueprint to close the troubled jail complex, has been named the administration’s new “Rikers czar,” THE CITY has learned.
“Dana is a superlative choice to lead this complicated effort,” said Liz Glazer, her former boss at the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. “This is a task that is beyond just Rikers — not just bricks and mortar, but changing the culture inside both for the people incarcerated and the officers.”
Kaplan, whose appointment has not been officially announced, did not immediately respond to a text message seeking comment. THE CITY spoke with two sources close to City Hall who confirmed her hiring.
In March, the city said it was looking for a so-called Rikers czar to “serve as a trusted advisor to the mayor” and his top team. The salary was listed as $180,000 to $230,000.
The city is legally required to shut down Rikers Island by 2027 and replace it with a network of smaller jails located near courthouses.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has acknowledged that the city will not meet that deadline but he has supported the broader plan and is seeking to move it along. His predecessor, Eric Adams, repeatedly talked about needing a “Plan B” for Rikers Island, but never detailed what that would look like.
After leaving the mayor’s office in 2022, Kaplan worked with the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform and served as a senior advisor to the Independent Rikers Commission.
The creation of the Rikers czar was one of the key recommendations of that commission.
New Jails, Old Oppositon
Kaplan’s appointment comes as the city on Wednesday marked a milestone in building the replacement jail system, raising the final steel beam at a new downtown Brooklyn facility set to open in 2029.
“The facilities on Rikers Island are very old, decrepit, and they don’t speak life into our staff or the people in our care,” Correction Commissioner Stanley Richards told reporters.
Richards recalled how, as a pre-trial detainee on Rikers during his youth, he felt the jail was “punishing” his father, who had to make a long trek to visit him.
“After that visit, I asked him not to come back,” Richards said. “We lived in the Bronx, and he had to take a bus, then a train, then another bus, just to get to the Island and go through the lengthy process of reaching one of the visit spaces in the jails.
“It took him an entire day for a one-hour visit,” he added.
Supporters of the new jails note that they will make it easier for family and friends to visit. The new facilities are all closer to criminal courthouses.
Currently, detainees are woken up as early as 4 a.m. and hauled to courts throughout the city. The process, known as Bullpen Therapy after the courthouse holding pens, is used by prosecutors to force defendants to plead guilty or accept inferior plea deals, criminal justice advocates say.
The Brooklyn lockup is expected to be the first of the new jails completed, according to city officials.
In January, construction began for the new jail in Chinatown, a project expected to take six years. The 1,040-bed jail on White Street, the final piece of the Rikers closing plan, is expected to cost $3.9 billion and to be completed in 2032.
Chinatown activists and community leaders have fought the project at every turn, from protests and lawsuits to direct appeals to City Hall, pressing their case to multiple mayors, including Mamdani.
The three unions representing city jail officers and supervisors have also long opposed the plan. They say it would be easier and cheaper to simply build new facilities on Rikers.
Backers of the shutdown plan say the new borough facilities will redefine how people accused of crimes are cared for and treated.
“The design principles that we are using, speak life into anybody who comes into the facility,” Richards said, “with community space, with social service space, with textures and paintings and colors and operational efficiencies that would allow the department to manage whoever comes into our care for generations.”
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