There’s something hokey going on at the city’s pokey.
As pressure mounts to reduce violence at the troubled jails, top correction bosses — seeking to create the impression they have turned matters around — repeatedly order underlings to downgrade incidents, a Daily News review of scores of internal documents shows.
Knife fights and ugly brawls between inmates, even attacks on officers, often end up airbrushed in the records as routine “log book entries,” sources familiar with the process say.
The main culprit, critics say, is Security Chief Turhan Gumusdere, a man who has faced scandal in the past for distorting data in the jails by deleting hundreds of fights among inmates from the records when he was a deputy warden.
They also have questions, they say, about Correction Commissioner Joseph Ponte, a touted reformer who nonetheless promoted Gumusdere into his job, even after the city’s Department of Investigation recommended he be demoted.