New York City
Editor’s note: From Rikers Island to Vacationland
There’s precedent for a New York City jails boss to seek respite up north.
A picturesque winding road in Maine. Cavan Images/Getty Images
I often think of Joseph Ponte, and how much time he spent driving on Interstate 95.
He was then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Department of Correction commissioner for three years before a bombshell investigation was published: Ponte was driving his city vehicle to Maine just about every weekend.
I’ve 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.
This was, rightfully, a scandal, and Ponte was forced to resign. He wasn’t 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.
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’t 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’t be called to an emergency.
City & State has closely covered the politics and policy impacting Rikers Island and the people detained there. We’re revisiting it this week, as City & State’s Sahalie Donaldson reports on how new leadership has people feeling optimistic – strange as that may feel. One of the newbies, the federally appointed manager Nicholas Deml, is from Vermont. I hope he doesn’t go back too often.