I often think of Joseph Ponte, and how much time he spent driving on Interstate 95.<\/p>\n
He was then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio\u2019s Department of Correction commissioner for three years before a bombshell investigation<\/a> was published: Ponte was driving his city vehicle to Maine just about every weekend.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve driven from New York to Maine. Even had a great lobster roll in the town of Wiscasset, where Ponte owned a home. The trip took basically an entire day. And Ponte was doing it constantly. Twenty-eight trips out of state in total, 90 days in all, most of them in Maine.<\/p>\n This was, rightfully, a scandal, and Ponte was forced to resign<\/a>. He wasn\u2019t just misusing a city vehicle, he was skipping town while overseeing the notoriously dysfunctional Rikers Island. Violence in city jails was escalating, reaching its highest level since the mid-90s, and correction officers were working overtime.<\/p>\n But on a human level, I understood Ponte. When your job is overseeing a hellhole, when your job is fixing a department with so many knotty problems you don\u2019t know where to start pulling, it must have felt pretty good to get in your city-owned SUV and just drive. De-stress on the highway, and end up so far away that you can\u2019t be called to an emergency.<\/p>\n City & State has closely covered<\/a> the politics<\/a> and policy<\/a> impacting Rikers Island and the people detained there<\/a>. We\u2019re revisiting it this week, as City & State\u2019s Sahalie Donaldson reports on how new leadership has people feeling optimistic \u2013 strange as that may feel. One of the newbies, the federally appointed manager Nicholas Deml, is from Vermont. I hope he doesn\u2019t go back too often.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I often think of Joseph Ponte, and how much time he spent driving on Interstate 95. He was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":180627,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[6492,9,24,11,10,299],"class_list":{"0":"post-180630","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-editors-note","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-new-york-headlines","12":"tag-new-york-news","13":"tag-opinion"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180630\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/180627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}