Dear Mayor Eric Adams and Speaker Adrienne Adams,

We are writing as a community of diverse faith leaders to call upon the Mayor and the City Council to pass a budget with adequate funding for supportive housing for New Yorkers involved with the justice system. As a multifaith coalition, we view the accessibility of supportive housing for justice-involved individuals as a religious, moral, and ethical issue.  

As you know, supportive housing offers affordable housing with wrap-around services and access to treatment for people who are experiencing homelessness while struggling with mental health issues and/or addiction. It makes all New Yorkers safer by addressing the underlying conditions that can lead to crime – preventing harm and violence from occurring in the first place, thereby keeping people out of the Rikers Island jail complex.

In previous communications, we have shared our deep concern about the inhumane and deadly conditions facing detainees at Rikers Island. Closing Rikers is a primary focus of both the New York Jewish Coalition for Criminal Justice Reform and Interfaith Center of New York’s advocacy and educational efforts. It is estimated that almost 2,600 people who are homeless and suffering from serious mental illness and/or addiction issues cycle through Rikers each year. Among this vulnerable population almost no one leaves Rikers better off than when they went in. Supportive housing has been proven to interrupt this dangerous cycle, and reduce recidivism, by providing people with stability, treatment, and basic human dignity.

Across our diverse faith traditions, home is a symbol of the rootedness and stability that enables human beings to thrive. Shelter – a place of rest and safety – is named as a fundamental right. In our scriptures and other sacred sources, we are all exhorted to provide relief for those without homes. We therefore see the City’s investment in supportive housing as a profound moral obligation. Moreover, this investment is overwhelmingly fiscally sound. Maintaining an individual in supportive housing costs about $50,000 per year, while incarcerating the same individual at Rikers Island costs ten times as much.

Increased funding for supportive housing is essential not only to reduce the number of incarcerated New Yorkers and expedite the closure of Rikers Island, but also to address the City’s interconnected problems of inadequate mental health and substance abuse services, insufficient affordable housing, and increased homelessness. We therefore support the City Council’s proposal for $57.8 million of new funding to expand supportive housing, including $12.8 million specifically for people involved with the justice system, and urge you to pass a budget which includes this funding.  

We also call upon the City to change the regulation that bars people from almost all supportive housing if they have been in Rikers for more than 90 days. On average, people with a mental illness awaiting a trial at Rikers remain in jail for 330 days. 

Supportive housing is an effective, fiscally sound, and morally grounded pathway towards return, restoration, and reintegration for justice-involved New Yorkers. We look forward to your support for its expansion. 

Thank you,