Jan Lee, co-founder of Neighbors United Below Canal, joins Cheddar News to discuss how the new mega jail in NYC's Chinatown will negatively impact the community.

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How a Mega Jail in Chinatown Will Impact The Community

it was on gender. Newsom baker machado in new york back in 2017, Mayor de Blasio approved an $8.3 billion borough based jail program that would include building the world's tallest jail in chinatown. Now, what's being considered a major hit to the community of chinatown New york city's decision now to replace Rikers Island with four borough based jails is receiving some major backlash. Earlier this month, a human chain was formed on Baxter street blocking construction crews from starting work on that new jail and many protesters were arrested, including Evelyn Yang, the wife of former presidential and mayoral candidate Andrew yang. So joining us now to discuss is Jan lee, a co founder of neighbors United below Canal, Jan, such a pleasure to have you here as a resident of Manhattan. And I know a lot of Manhattan residents would probably echo the same thing I'm saying. We hadn't heard this story. This was something a lot of us had not even heard about, explain a little bit about what the proposal is here and why so many people within chinatown are so opposed to this. You know, this was a project that was conceived in 2017 before a pandemic before we went through a lot of the issues that we're going through today. Um this was predicated upon closing Rikers Island, which everyone agrees is an absolute disgrace and something that we really need to take a hard look at. And in fact a federal monitor is looking at that right now about what can be done with that with that, with the conditions that led to this aberrant um behavior on the island and what's led to be such a, such a terrible place. So the idea to build smaller jails, Um, it's something that actually started in 1970s, you know, really small jails, jails that were so small, you wouldn't even notice they were in your neighborhood, but over the decades, that idea about having smaller jails became bastardized, particularly the one in chinatown to be a fairly large jail. And keeping that incarceration footprint really big is something that went against The general way of thinking even in the 70s. And so this jail taller than the statue of liberty enormous, one of the largest tallest jails in the world is again a bastardization of the idea of having smaller fare More just buildings to cure what is essentially something that's a personnel problem and by the way, very expensive. What $8 billion $8.3 billion dollars was it was a figure that was thrown out there years ago. We don't know with inflation whether or not that's when they finally break ground, We're gonna be talking about something much higher. And let's not forget this is borrowed money. So the interest rates on that is going to be something that new york city is gonna be paying for for a long time into our kids generation, Let's talk about the the alley, I think a lot of people thought they had in this, which is Mayor eric Adams and all of this when candidate ERIC Adams was campaigning, he campaigned with you against this particular. Absolutely, and you know, and now and now it's about facing the the mayor currently still wants this, this jail to go up now, you know, he stood with us and uh you know, shoulder to shoulder with me actually at, at our press conference and he said that the building of a skyscraper jail in Chinatown is another form of institutionalized hate against this community. And I believe that that's true. Um what Has taken place though between 2021 and 2022, there's a lot of pressure on him. We want to give the mayor a real option here. That's a win win. That can actually reuse adaptive Lee reuse what we have here take a look at the new budget, take a look at what can be done, um, something that's not going to be so impactful, years, long demolition, years long construction, these things have impacts on our community. And again, in the context of what Chinatown has had to go through with disinvestment, taking away our green spaces, taking away things from the community that were promised to us Even when the first jail went up, we were supposed to have a plaza taken away. So these things are indications of how our neighborhood is continually disinvested in and yet since 1838 we've watched jails on that same location be torn down and built up again and torn down and built up again. And every time that they built one, they built them bigger. And every time that they built one it was rife with more problems. This jail is only 40 years old and we look around in new york city and you look around at most of the 40 year old buildings, they're perfectly fine. So we're left with wondering how is this money being spent? Is it efficient? Is it something that we should look at to say? Maybe it's not the buildings, maybe it's the management that really needs to be looked at and why spread out the ills of Rikers island into communities all over new york city. If we haven't even addressed what's happening on Rikers now well. And the other part to this is this is an area of new york city which is still recovering from 9 11, there's still many pockets of, of Manhattan that are still recovering from 9 11. Then you compound that with the pandemic on top of that. What about the business angle here, is there a concern may be that this will have concerns for businesses or other people from the, in the surrounding areas as a result of this going up. You know, my family's been in chinatown for three generations. I've I've witnessed for myself the hardships between Hurricane Sandy and 9 11 and hurricane IDa And these, these things that We're natural disasters that that we had to bear the brunt of being in lower Manhattan, you know, we were still within the the the problems all about economic recovery from 9.11. But you're very right on top of that, on top of Covid we had um things that we're constantly being given to us as reactions of investments, not sustainable investment. And that's where we're very different than other parts of the city. We just keep getting jails and we keep getting homeless shelters where other neighborhoods don't have these things and that that hems us in from future growth that hems us in in a lot of ways where us psychologically it's very hard to deal with this. And when tourists come to chinatown and they start to see this construction going on, they see this streets being closed. It's it's just another indication of why people would want to stay away from this area instead of being drawn to it. So these are the these are the issues, we still have a housing crisis in Chinatown. The last affordable housing was built in 1976. And since, since the housing was built this big housing project, we've had the Manhattan correctional facility. We've had the um metropolitan correctional complex, we've had six homeless shelters. These are things built Since the last affordable housing. And so you can see where the priorities are for the city for you and and and I only have about another 60 seconds left with you. Could you even just make even the financial argument that incarceration is probably not even the best use of $8.3 billion. There's other sorts of ways to sort of remedy this process, be it through rehab facilities or other things. that more, you know, we, we believe that absolutely, we believe that people should not have to be incarcerated to receive the services that they need to heal. And this is an upside down equation. We want to see the communities that are most affected by the criminal justice system have a robust investment in their communities in the way of job training and health care and youth programs and things that will keep actually people from going into jail and keep that population low so that we could have very small jails. Yeah, Jan I had no idea about the story. I'm so glad you came on to share all the details about this. That's Jan lee, a co founder of neighbors United Below Canal. Thank you so much, Jan