Rikers Island
Rikers Island is New York City's largest jail facility, sitting on a 415 acre (1.68km) plot of land in the East River between the boroughs of Queens and the Bronx. The jail complex has a budget of $860 million a year, a staff of 10,000 officers and 1,500 civilians to control a yearly inmate population of up to 130,000.
The facility generally holds about 15,000 inmates at a time, although the daytime population (including staff) can be 20,000 or more. The inmate population is seven times the entire inmate population of the prison system of the state of Maine, and more inmates than the prison systems of 35 other states.
The facility, which consists of ten jails, holds local offenders who are awaiting trial and cannot afford or cannot obtain bail, those serving sentences of one year or less, and those temporarily placed there pending transfer to another facility which does not have space.
While technically the facility is located in the Bronx borough, the only access to the facility (that most people in the city are unaware of or have failed to notice) is from the borough of Queens over the unmarked 1.28km (4,200 ft) three-lane Rikers Island Bridge, built in 1966. Before the bridge was constructed, the only access to the island was by ferry.
The facility is named after Abraham Rycken, a Dutch settler who moved to Long Island in 1638 and whose descendants owned Rikers Island until 1884, when it was sold to the city for $180,000 and has been used as a jail in one form or another ever since.
