Jocsan Rojas, sixteen, had traveled to Astoria from Staten Island with his mom, and the two were waiting excitedly to speak to mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. A junior at New York’s Harbor School, located on Governors Island, Rojas had written an extensive research paper on the proposed closure of New York’s notorious Rikers Island jail and wanted to share his insights with Mamdani and his policy team. Rojas argued for remaking Rikers as a school, much like the school he attends, only a rehabilitative one for the incarcerated.

Indeed, he said, the island itself should be rehabilitated to be more like Governors Island, with bike lanes and pedestrian walkways. “Rikers Island is something you don’t want to think about,” he said. “Make it into a place people want to go, maybe a tourist attraction. Get rid of the stigma.”

Rojas told me what he had learned about the island in the course of his project — during the Civil War, it was a training facility for Union soldiers — and mused about punishment, noting that a prisoner had died there just last week. “They put [prisoners] in a dark room with no furniture for days,” he emphasized, explaining why it was important to end the isolation of the island and its inmates. “How do you expect these people to rehabilitate into society?”