One year after a blue-ribbon commission issued a landmark plan aimed at the eventual closure of Rikers Island, New York City's five district attorneys remain divided over whether shuttering the sprawling jail complex is a good idea.

Last year, the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, chaired by former Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, recommended gradually closing Rikers over a 10-year period and diverting the city's inmate population to borough-based jails.

In February, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he brokered a deal with New York City Council members to house 5,000 inmates in smaller jails around the city. The de Blasio administration has also announced that a Rikers facility that currently houses 600 inmates will be closed this summer.

Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. have endorsed the commission's plan to close Rikers.

Vance's office has even helped to lay the groundwork for closing Rikers, chipping in more than $20 million to expand the city's supervised release program and to divert low-level offenders from the criminal justice system.

But Queens District Attorney Richard Brown and Staten Island District Attorney Michael McMahon remain opposed to the proposal. They argue the city's money would be better spent improving Rikers instead of building new jail space in the boroughs.

“Upgraded facilities would also better allow for the implementation of new and sorely needed programming, particularly in the area of mental health and vocational training,” McMahon said in a statement emailed by a spokesman.

McMahon, who has pushed for establishing community justice centers such as those set up in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn and Midtown Manhattan, also said community justice and diversionary programs would be a better investment for the city.

De Blasio said last year that Staten Island would not receive a new jail.

In the months since the release of the commission's report, Brown's office has spoken out publicly to denounce not only the idea of closing Rikers but also to refute the notion that the jail is packed with thousands of nonviolent offenders who are stuck there because they are too poor to afford bail.

James Quinn, Brown's senior executive ADA, said misdemeanor defendants who are stuck on Rikers because they can't make bail make up a small sliver of the inmate population there: of the more than 1,700 offenders from Queens currently held on Rikers, about 40 fit that description.

Most of the inmates on Rikers, Quinn said, are “there for a reason.”

“They are the worst of the worst and it just drives me crazy that that argument is not being addressed or brought up by anybody,” Quinn said.

Rikers, located in the East River between Queens and the Bronx, has long been criticized for corruption, violence and bad conditions for inmates, but calls to close Rikers reached a fever pitch after the 2015 suicide of Kalief Browder, who was held there for three years for a robbery charge for which he was never convicted.

On Thursday, the reform commission issued a one-year status report that stated the inmate population on Rikers on 9,000 has fallen by about 800 over the past year. But Quinn said initial reductions in the Rikers population will amount to “low-hanging fruit” and that the city will find it more difficult to make further reductions. Cutting much deeper into the population could present a public safety issue for the city, he said.

“We aren't here to defend Rikers Island,” Quinn said. “That's not our goal. Our goal here is to make this an informed discussion where we sit down and look at the facts,” Quinn said.

As for additional jail space in Queens, officials have discussed expanding the Queens House of Detention, which can hold a population of 475 prisoners.

City Councilman Rory Lancman, a Queens Democrat who chairs the council's Justice System Committee and who sits on its Criminal Justice Committee, said he was surprised that the views of his borough's district attorney's office on Rikers are “so out of step” with other DA's offices in the city.

Lancman, who supports the reform commission's recommendations, said that in his conversations with constituents, he has found broad support for closing Rikers.

“The rhetoric and the unofficial data being thrown around on this issue is very unfortunate and adds more heat than light to a very serious issue that affects the public safety of all New Yorkers and the lives of hundreds of thousands of mostly black and brown men who get caught up in the broad sweep of the criminal justice system,” Lancman said.

But a spokeswoman for City Councilman Robert Holden, also a Democrat from Queens who sits on the Criminal Justice Committee but opposes closing Rikers, said that many Queens residents would prefer not to see a new jail in their borough and that Holden supports using city resources to improve the existing facilities on Rikers.

“You can't replicate that in all four boroughs” outside Staten Island, said Sarah Sicard, Holden's press secretary.