This is one of four new vertical jails that the city is building to replace Rikers Island, the Dickensian jail complex in the East River. Approved by the city council in 2019, the plan will cost $16bn and is already running half a decade behind schedule. For ease of access, the new jails will be close to the courthouses in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, right in the heart of the boroughs’ downtowns. That required architects to turn to the classic New York solution: building up. Although vertical jails have been built before, the cost and ambition of these is new. Currently Rikers Island houses the bulk of New York City’s 6,700 inmates, around 85% of whom are in pre-trial detention. The prison has a long history of brutality and neglect: in 2015, when levels of violence were so high as to be deemed unconstitutional, a federal monitoring team was put on the island. In the decade since, conditions have only worsened. “It would be a dream if we could even get back to [those] levels of violence,” says Liz Glazer, who led the city’s criminal-justice office under the then mayor, Bill de Blasio. The rate of use of force in the jails has more than doubled and the rate of death, in proportion to the population, is up by 82%. Last year a judge placed the jails under the control of an independent, federally appointed boss. Replacing Rikers with court-side, vertical jails will come with its own problems. “It is completely unprecedented and 100% unique,” says Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute, a think-tank. “This is going to present challenges that I don’t think anyone has foreseen.” Neighbours who live near the sites, especially in Manhattan’s Chinatown, have been outraged. Although the initial plan set a deadline to build the new jails and close Rikers Island by 2027, the latest estimates expect construction will not be completed until 2032.
Alongside the usual challenges of building in New York, and the novel one of taking a form associated with office buildings or apartments and incorporating fences, an exercise yard and guard tower, the architects are hoping their designs will be more just. The latest sketches for the new jails look more like university faculties than concrete fortresses. The lower floors house public lobbies, visiting areas and medical facilities. Higher floors have housing units with large terraces, complete with basketball hoops and plant beds. It is “not a little bit of light and air”, says Beverly Prior, an architect and the project manager. “You will feel the heat, you will see the sunlight.” The terraces are encased in a mesh that will both stop people getting out (or in), and also allow inmates to look up, at the sky, and not down, at those on the street (the mesh will also stop those on the street from looking in). The designers have high hopes. “It is about building that empathy and starting to see what architecture can do,” says Ms Prior. They think some features, such as single cells and positioning guards behind a desk, rather than in a tower or a glassed-in booth, can reduce violence by encouraging a better atmosphere. Although this style of jail has been around since the 1970s and is common in northern Europe, there is little quantitative research on its effects in America or in jails with high turnover, says Keramet Reiter of the University of California, Irvine. But done well it is a way for staff to
feel that they have the tools they need to control inmates, she says, and make confrontations between jailers and jailed less explosive. There are obstacles to overcome before the city gets to that point, though. The new jails will have a maximum capacity of 4,160, which is only 60% the current population of inmates. Getting numbers down is “an absolutely possible thing to do”, says Ms Glazer, Mr de Blasio’s former staffer, “but somebody needs to be in charge of it.” One way is to reduce the length of time inmates are waiting for their trial, she says, but this requires co- ordination between courts, prosecutors and the police. Another concern is the price tag: the total cost of two new prisons being built in Illinois is projected to be $900m. New York’s four are expected to cost eight times more. The eventual cost of upkeep of the vertical jails could also be high, especially considering how reliant on lifts they will be, says Michael Jacobson of the City University of New York. Still, existing arrangements are hardly a bargain. Keeping a person on Rikers costs $450,000 a year. Many previous attempts at jail reform in New York City have failed. Indeed, Rikers Island was once itself a vision of the future, a place where inmates would have more space and light than in those dank inner-city jails. But for Darren Mack, a former inmate on Rikers who is now a prison reformer, the jailscrapers present “a generational opportunity”. “ There is definitely a humongous improvement to the design and conditions,” he says. ■ Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//united-states/2026/06/03/meet-the-jailscraper
Donald Trump says Pete Hegseth loves war. That should disqualify him How did standards for military leaders fall so low? June 4th 2026 Of all the jokes President Donald Trump has told at his aides’ expense, none has been more demeaning than his remark in late May about his civilian leader of the armed forces, Pete Hegseth. “He loves war,” Mr Trump said during a cabinet meeting, grinning as he patted Mr Hegseth on the arm. Mr Hegseth, fawning, chortled along. If Mr Hegseth meant what he has often said about America’s need to restore its warrior ethos, he should have winced instead. In the code of America’s greatest generals, hatred of war has been as foundational as grim awareness of the necessity to prepare for it. “War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly,” General Dwight Eisenhower told the graduating class of the United States Military Academy
at West Point in 1947. Fifteen years later, General Douglas MacArthur, no one’s idea of a pacifist, cautioned the cadets against becoming warmongers. “On the contrary,” he said, “the soldier above all other people prays for peace.” Mr Trump may just have been teasing Mr Hegseth, as he had before, for his early advocacy of a war with Iran that is stuck in a costly stalemate. Yet with his knack for naming discomfiting truths, the president put his finger on an unsettling quality in his “secretary of war”, the title that he and Mr Hegseth prefer. Where past military leaders treated violence as a tragic necessity, Mr Hegseth celebrates it as righteous and even thrilling. His favourite word—it does sound pretty cool—is “lethality”. When he got his own chance to address West Point cadets, at their commencement on May 23rd, he deployed the word five times, not counting two mobilisations of “lethal”. By contrast, “peace” clouded his vision of ferocity only once, thus: “You feel comfortable inside the violence,” he instructed the cadets, “so that our fellow citizens can live peacefully. Lethality is your calling card.” The essence of Mr Hegseth’s message would strike past leaders of the military as conventional: troops must be ready to fight and win. From his years in the National Guard, Mr Hegseth has a horror of being exposed as under-equipped. In his book “The War on Warriors”, published in 2024, he twice refers to a recurring “standing-naked-in-front-of-the-class nightmare” about being on a mission. “I’m racked with anxiety,” he writes. “Where is my weapon? I can’t find my rifle. I’m hoping nobody will notice.” (Well, Freud might have observed, sometimes a rifle is just a rifle.) But, like hanging on to one’s rifle, the readiness to kill when called upon has traditionally been only a baseline requirement in the eyes of America’s greatest warriors. They have usually asked more of rising military leaders. When, as president, Eisenhower again addressed a West Point commencement, in 1955, he reflected on his own complacency upon graduating there 40 years earlier. The pace of change, the arrival of catastrophically powerful new weaponry, had since sharpened a “need for wisdom, and the caution that wisdom enforces”. Cadets had to prepare not just to command but to understand the economic, political and spiritual aspirations of other peoples: “Your entire lives may and should be as seriously devoted to leading toward peace as in preparing yourselves for the