Governor Andrew Cuomo, reversing a previous stance, now says he does not support the plan to close the Rikers Island jail complex by 2027.

Mr. Cuomo, who is running for mayor of New York City as an independent, announced this reversal at a Crain’s Business Mayoral Forum on Wednesday morning, calling the city plan to build four borough-based “community jails” to replace Rikers Island a “$16 billion boondoggle that will harm property values.”

Mr. Cuomo called Rikers Island “a human rights violation” for the deteriorating condition of its facilities, but says closing it is not the practical approach. Instead, he is proposing a phased rebuild of the jail while keeping the facility in operation, as he did when overseeing the renovation of LaGuardia Airport or the L subway tunnel repair when he was governor.

He says the four borough-based jail sites should instead be used for affordable housing and mixed-use development. Some community members in the neighborhoods where these jails are slated to be built have protested the sites.

“We can and must do both things at once: Close Rikers as we know it, and rebuild it the right way,” Mr. Cuomo said.

New York’s city council voted in 2019 to close Rikers Island and build the four “community jails” at a cost of what was initially estimated to be about $8 billion. The projected completion of these jails is now years behind schedule, and the cost has since ballooned to more than $15 billion.

The new jails are slated to house roughly 4,000 inmates, while the current Rikers population tops 7,000. It’s unclear where the 3,000 additional prisoners would be housed or whether the plan is to decrease the overall jail population as was done during Covid. 

A former New York police commissioner, Bill Bratton, who oversaw historic reductions in crime as commissioner in the 1990s and again in Mayor de Blasio’s first term, told The New York Sun last month that the plan to close Rikers “will be a disaster.” 

During Wednesday’s appearance, Mr. Cuomo also took a dig at a former mayor, Bill De Blasio, who was in office when the city council voted on the Rikers closure plan in 2019. Mr. De Blasio is backing Mr. Cuomo’s rival, Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, in the mayor’s race. Mr. Mamdani is leading by double digits in polls.

“The Rikers closure plan is a continuation of the legacy of the failed De Blasio administration: Ideology over competence,” Mr. Cuomo said.  

The attack line is the same one Mr. Cuomo uses against Mr. Mamdani, who now supports the Rikers closure plan, though he criticized it in 2019 for not going far enough. Mr. Mamdani has flirted with the prison abolition movement and questioned what value prisons serve. He attacked progressive city council members who voted for the Rikers plan, posting to X, “It isn’t just rhetoric to say #NoNewJails.”

“Let it also clarify what we have known for years: this city’s much-heralded class of progressive electeds will take us only to the point of reform, not beyond. #NoNewJails,” Mr. Mamdani posted.

Mr. Cuomo supported the plan to close Rikers Island in 2019. “Rikers Island is a hellhole and Rikers Island has to be closed, and it has to be closed now,” Mr. Cuomo said. “As governor of the State of New York, I can’t tell you how proud I am to have closed more prisons than any governor in the history of the state, and I’m not done yet.”

Now, Mr. Cuomo is trailing Mr. Mamdani in the polls and needs to capture as many Republican and centrist votes as possible if he has any chance of moving into Gracie Mansion after the election. 

The Republican mayoral nominee, Curtis Sliwa, has made fighting crime the central issue in his campaign and never supported closing Rikers. He calls Mr. Cuomo a hypocrite, attacks the former governor’s flip-flops on criminal justice reform, and says Messrs. Cuomo and Mamdani are “two sides of the same disaster”

Backers of Mr. Cuomo are calling on Mr. Sliwa to drop out of the race to clear the field and give Mr. Cuomo a fighting chance at winning. Mr. Sliwa is refusing.

“When he was governor, he proudly announced to the world at the 2018 Global Citizens Festival that he would close Rikers. I have always opposed closing Rikers,” Mr. Sliwa tells the Sun. “The C in Curtis is for consistency. The C in Cuomo is for chaos.”