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Report: NYC Prison Scrubbed Records

Rikers staff allegedly downgraded incident reports.

Corrections officers at New York City's Rikers Island prison routinely fudged incident reports to create the impression of a less-violent facility, the New York Daily News reports. Top officers allegedly pressured staffers to downgrade violent incidents; when an inmate was allegedly beat by four others, for example, Rikers staff allegedly reported that he had hit his head on a bedpost. The News found nine incidents of these supposed downgrades, but believe them to represent just a fraction of actual incidents.

“They lie about the use of force statistics,” an anonymous corrections officer said. “This is a practice to keep the stats down.”