This past December, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul unveiled plans for Seneca, a slate of new affordable housing units located at the site of the former Lincoln Correctional Facility in Harlem. The minimum-security men’s prison, located at West 110th Street across from Central Park, was shuttered in 2019 and, under the Seneca proposal, will soon be home to 105 units designed for homeownership and community spaces for the public.
The proposal’s namesake is Seneca Village, an autonomous, predominantly Black community founded by free Black Americans in 1825. The thriving community of 225 people was located in a section of what is currently Central Park bounded by West 82nd and West 89th streets. In 1857, the City seized a large swath of land, including Seneca Village, displacing residents under eminent domain laws to begin constructing Central Park. The future Seneca project seeks to evoke this former community both because of its location directly across from Central Park and its goals to promote homeownership among Harlem residents—almost half of Seneca Village residents owned their homes. Prospective homebuyers looking to purchase in Seneca would only be required to put down 5% as their down payment for units priced to be affordable for households earning 80-100% of the area median income.
The $90 million Seneca proposal represents Hochul’s attempt to make good on promises to create more affordable housing options throughout the state and presents an example of how the redevelopment of former prison sites might work toward that goal. However, Seneca also throws an unexpected wrench into the campaign to establish a new women’s jail in the former Lincoln Facility, a plan met with both notable support and backlash from local communities, activists, advocates, and politicians.
#BeyondRosie’s and “gender-responsive” prisons
The campaign to establish a Harlem-based women’s jail emerged as a response to the existing plan to close the Rikers Island jail complex by 2027 and establish four new borough-based jails. Spearheaded by the Women’s Community Justice Association, the #BeyondRosie’s campaign has honed its focus on women and gender-nonconforming people detained in Rose M. Singer, or “Rosie’s,” the women’s jail within the Riker’s complex. Under the existing borough-based jail plan, Rosie’s will be replaced with a new facility set to be constructed in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens. While men and women will be detained separately in this facility, they will also share some common areas, such as medical and programming spaces and a single corridor leading to the attached courthouse.
Organizers within #BeyondRosie’s have argued that having women and gender-nonconforming people detained in shared spaces would pose the risk that many would be detained in the same facility as their own abusers, particularly given that 77% of women detained in Rikers are also survivors of domestic violence. #BeyondRosie’s supporters also argue that even beyond safety and physical protection, a separate facility in Harlem would place incarcerated women in a more central location, enabling their families—the majority of whom live throughout Harlem, parts of Brooklyn, and the Bronx—to visit more easily.
This proposed Harlem facility, known as the Women’s Center for Justice, would also architecturally look and feel different than traditional carceral facilities with more domestic design elements, individual showers, specialized areas for cooking and grooming, and the presence of social workers as opposed to correctional guards. A “Reentry at Entry” plan would also connect detained women with local nonprofits providing supportive services.
These concerns around mixed-gender facilities and the overall vision for what the Women’s Center for Justice would have looked like sit within a larger push for “gender-responsive facilities.” Arguments in favor of such facilities posit that because women have unique pathways into the carceral system and unique challenges once inside it, the facilities they are detained within must also be distinct from traditional men’s facilities. Advocates against this idea, however, argue that “gender-responsive” facilities actually expand and entrench the harms of the carceral state, legitimizing it by suggesting that it is reformable and even “feminist.”
This opposition has targeted a suite of new initiatives emerging throughout the carceral system that advocates say fall under the umbrella of “carceral humanism,” or an attempt to recast the prison system as a social service provider. That marketing becomes clear in how the Women’s Center for Justice was promoted to the public as a space for healing and a site where detainees could receive job assistance and mental health care. In earlier Prism reporting on the proposed Center for Justice, opponents of the plan highlighted both that the provision of such services should not only be limited to women and that they need not exist within a carceral context at all. Incarceration, in fact, erodes the very things that such a space would purport to provide.
An open letter published by No New Women’s Jail NYC in July 2022 and signed by more 200 community organizers, students, and scholars across the country articulated similar concerns, writing that “we know this plan, like other efforts to repackage incarceration as humane and progressive, does not chart us away from the prison industrial complex” and that “some feminists are currently endorsing this jail construction plan, perhaps on the mistaken belief that a ‘feminist jail’ is the best that criminalized, gender oppressed people can hope for.”
The letter goes on to highlight the gender-based violence that pervades the carceral system, underscoring how incarceration, at its core, is incompatible with feminism. Notably, it also condemns academic institutions like Columbia University for supporting the #BeyondRosie’s campaign and the University of Texas at Austin for supporting a similar women’s jail proposal in Travis County, Texas.
While the proposed Travis County jail served as a model for Harlem’s would-be Women’s Center for Justice, in 2021, Travis County Commissioners voted to unanimously pause the jail’s construction plan. The resolution to pause also recommended convening a working group to brainstorm ways to reduce the number of women currently incarcerated in the county jail and to better serve the physical and mental health needs of those currently incarcerated. According to reporting from the Austin American-Statesman, about 800 people submitted comments opposing the new women’s jail, and roughly 100 people publicly spoke at a hearing to oppose it as well.
While the indefinite pausing of the Travis County jail is a victory for abolitionist organizers, there have been and continue to be proposals for new women’s prison construction across the country with varying levels of support and legislative buy-in. Lawmakers in New Jersey have announced plans to construct a $300 million women’s facility to replace the state’s current women’s prison that has been plagued by crumbling infrastructure. Much like the Women’s Center for Justice, state officials have attempted to garner support for the project by highlighting the centrality of its new location and how increased access to public transportation and major roadways will ease the visitation process for family and friends.
In South Dakota, the second women’s prison in the state broke ground in October of last year and is slated to open in 2026. Early last year, North Dakota lawmakers approved a $161 million proposal for a new women’s prison in the Mandan area, citing overcrowding and lack of supportive mental health services among the reasons why a new facility is needed. Last spring, the state’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation began accepting proposals from architectural firms for the proposed 260-bed facility.
Prison redevelopment commission
In the open letter by No New Women’s Jail NYC, the collective wrote that the proposed location for the Women’s Center for Justice in West Harlem “perpetuates a racial geography and history of violence at a time when the city and state of New York have pushed forward austerity measures despite residents of these neighborhoods calling for local, life-sustaining initiatives: access to affordable and quality food, housing, health care and child care, funding for transportation and public education, and truly transformative and reparative responses to interpersonal harm.”
It is perhaps then a hopeful turn of events that the state has decided to convert Lincoln Correctional into housing. In announcing construction plans for Seneca, Hochul described the project as one that “will unlock tools to help us address the housing crisis, create jobs, and improve New Yorkers’ quality of life.” Hochul further mentioned that the proposal aligns with the recommendation of the state’s Prison Redevelopment Commission, a panel of 15 leaders from across the state who have been convening to discuss how to best reimagine the sites of currently or soon-to-be shuttered jails and prisons.
In a comprehensive report released in 2022, the commission noted that thoughtful consideration of prison redevelopment is crucial as declines in the state’s incarcerated population have led to the closure of more than 20 prison facilities across New York in the past two decades. When these facilities are closed “cold,” the report notes, they are prone to rapid deterioration, pose security risks, and become more difficult to redevelop.
The commission’s report focuses on 12 shuttered prisons across the state, drawing observations and analyses from site visits and community engagement sessions. The report includes profiles of each site outlining key information on its infrastructure, layout, transportation access, notes on land use around the facility, and other details necessary for ideating redevelopment plans. The report also presents case studies of existing prison redevelopment projects and general recommendations on what considerations should be made to help facilitate new redevelopment projects throughout the state.
Recommendations were in part based on surveying whether sites of interest were “underwater” and perhaps better suited for demolition. The commission encouraged that existing sites be split into smaller parcels and marketed individually. Other key recommendations included engaging with community members and surveying their concerns and desires for what redevelopment might look like and what industries their community needs most. While Lincoln Correctional was not among the 12 sites surveyed by the commission, its impending transformation into Seneca aligns with another key recommendation to prioritize affordable housing when considering how these sites will be used in the future.
