Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Sunday refused to say whether he supports the existence of prisons.
While showering praise on Darializa Avila Chevalier — the divisive far-left democratic socialist who won the Dem nod for New York’s 13th Congressional District and has called to abolish prisons — Mamdani dodged revealing if he agrees with her on the issue.
“There are prisons,” Mamdani told ABC News’ “This Week” while refusing to answer the question about his stance.
“What we’re also showing in this city is that safety is not something that’s up for debate; it is something that we’re actually delivering on,” he said as if campaigning.
While running for state assembly in 2020, Mamdani questioned the need for prisons, saying in an interview, “What purpose do they serve?
“I think a lot of people who defend the carceral state, they defend the idea of it and the way it makes them feel. They’re not defending the reality of it and the practices that are part and parcel of it,” he said.
“If you actually break it down and ask people how many people come out of the prison system better than they went into the prison system, how much harm is actually being prevented versus created?”
During the 2025 race for mayor, Mamdani also grappled with his past social-media posts bashing the New York Police Department as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.” He called to “#DefundTheNYPD.”
Last year, he claimed, “I am not running to defund the police” and that he has “grown” as an individual.
But he doesn’t appear to have fully distanced himself from his past criticism of prisons.
As mayor, Hizzoner has pushed to shutter the Rikers Island jail complex, which holds the majority of the Big Apple’s worst criminal offenders.
“The Mayor is fully committed to closing Rikers Island, replacing it with a smaller, safer, and more humane borough-based jail system that better serves people in custody, correction officers, and all New Yorkers, and building a criminal justice system that is fairer and improves public safety across the five boroughs,” a Mamdani spokesperson told The Post.
Avila Chevalier, who took down Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairman Adriano Espaillat in the primary last week, scrubbed her social media of her previous calls to abolish prisons as well as the border and her championing of communism.
She also once blasted former President Joe Biden as a rapist, wrote “f—k” Kamala Harris and boasted about wiping her dirty hands on the American flag while trashing the US.
The Dem candidate slammed men of color on Twitter, too, for engaging in interracial relationships with white women.
“Black men [handshake emoji] Arab men fetishizing ugly colonizer women,” the post said.
“The focus of her candidacy was about the struggle that working people are facing,” Mamdani claimed in Sunday’s interview. “And I think that we can have disagreements on policy positions.
“What we have to agree on is what are we fighting for and who are we fighting for. She showed that in her race, and I think that many people will come to appreciate that in her leadership to come.”
