9. Staten Island Ferry Boats Were Once Used As Prisons

In 1987, the severe overcrowding of Rikers Island Prison forced Mayor Ed Koch to look for space elsewhere. Explaining in a New York Times article, Koch never again wanted “‘never again be [to be] in the situation where we once were, when we had to free prisoners because we didn’t have enough jail space.”

With a population of 14,700, Rikers was 1,000 people over capacity so Koch came up with the plan to convert two Staten Island Ferry boats into barges that would sit off the coast of the Bronx holding 162 inmates each. Many locksmiths turned down the job to redesign the engine room so inmates couldn’t get in, but Thomas King, owner of Advance Lock and Key in Midland Beach took up that task, installing high security locks on the doors and welded special boxes on each door in order to get to them.

Not meant as a temporary solution, two additional facilities were being proposed to be built in upstate New York as the city predicated the continued increase in the number of arrests and convictions, mainly drug-related.

Plenty of controversy remains over the fact that the over population in inmates should not be fixed by making more room, instead more effort should be made to create alternative-sentencing programs and reduce the numbers of detainees, as the executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, Robert Gangi explained then.

Today, the plans for a new facility have approached again with the worsening and severely dilapidated condition of the prison island, with a temporary Kew Gardens facility in the works. The Department of Corrections stopped using the Rikers ferries in 1997, said DNAinfo.