Last operating US prison ship, a grim vestige of mass incarceration, set to close in NYC

NEW YORK (AP) — Kenneth Williams spent his whole life in Brooklyn, but it wasn’t until a night in 2018 when he crossed a narrow footbridge in shackles, that he learned about New York City’s last floating jail. He remembers the murky East River water below him, the stench of mold, and a sinking feeling that soon turned literal.

“Every once in a while you could feel the boat dropping into the muck,” Williams, 62, said. “It was a stark reminder that this place wasn’t meant for human confinement.”

Docked in the shallows off an industrial edge of the South Bronx, the Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center is a five-story jail barge that stretches the length of two football fields, resembling a container ship stacked with cargo.

It arrived in 1992 as a temporary measure to ease overcrowding on Rikers Island, the city’s main jail complex for detainees awaiting trial. Three decades later, the 800-bed lockup – the last operating prison ship in the United States — is finally closing down.

The ship will be fully vacated by the end of this week, officials said, as part of a broader plan to replace the city’s long-troubled correctional system with a network of smaller jails. For now, most of the roughly 500 people incarcerated on the ship will be transferred to Rikers Island, according to the Department of Correction, though the jails there are eventually supposed to close down, too.

Detainees and advocates have long regarded the boat as a grim vestige of mass incarceration, an enduring symbol of the city’s failures to reform dangerous jails that exist on the periphery of New York, largely out of sight of most residents and tourists.

In recent years, the unusual nautical jail has drawn attention primarily for its failures: Last September, a 44-year-old man, Gregory Acevedo, jumped from the top of the ship to his death; The year before that, Stephan Khadu, 24, died after contracting a form of treatable meningitis while in custody.