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MEDIA CRANKS UP HEAT ON BOP IN WAKE OF EPSTEIN SUICIDE

The Justice Dept. last Tuesday reassigned the warden at MCC New York, where Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself nine days ago, and placed on leave two Bureau of Prison staff who had been monitoring Epstein’s unit at the time. The shakeup came as the MCC fell under intense scrutiny, with critics calling the suicide “emblematic of a neglected, understaffed and dysfunctional federal prison system.”

A day earlier, Attorney General William P. Barr decried “serious irregularities” at the MCC and criticized the BOP’s “failure” to keep Epstein secure.

USA Today said that the suicide “has cast a jarring spotlight on the nation’s largest prison system plagued for years by dangerous staffing shortages, violence and widespread sexual harassment of female officers.”

Noting the BOP’s efforts to fill up to 5,000 vacancies and its lack of a director since Mark Inch resigned a year ago, Eric Young, national president of the federal prison workers union, said, “We’ve got a serious problem.”

The Houston Chronicle reported that Epstein’s suicide is “the latest black eye for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, the jail’s parent agency that already was under fire for the October death of Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger… Taken together, the deaths underscore ‘serious issues surrounding a lack of leadership’ within the BOP, said Cameron Lindsay, a former warden who ran three federal lockups, including the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.”

Other outlets reported that “major irregularities” in the MCC Special Housing Unit contributed to Epstein not being monitored properly. Those stories were followed by reports that the irregularities were primarily due to COs “working extreme overtime shifts to make up for staffing shortages the morning of his apparent suicide,” according to Politico. A BOP source was quoted as saying that the SHU was staffed with one guard working a fifth straight day of overtime and another who was working mandatory overtime.

The New York Times reported that one of the SHU guards that day was not a full-fledged correctional officer, and neither guard had checked on Epstein for several hours before he was discovered.

By the middle of last week, the focus was on BOP staffing levels. The Marshall Project reported that the Epstein suicide “followed steep and persistent staffing shortages that exceeded the rate of decline in the federal prison population… The federal prison system lost 12% of its workforce from the start of the Trump administration through the end of 2018. Administration officials have argued that the staff drop, which resulted partly from a hiring freeze, was mitigated by a reduction in the number of federal prisoners. But… over a two-year period between Sept. 2016 and Sept. 2018, the bureau lost 10% of its employees. In that same period, the total number of federal prisoners dropped by just over 5%.”

CNN reported that the BOP continues to rely on “augmentation,” using non-correctional officers in CO positions to cover staff shortages, noting that Congress has repeatedly asked the BOP to give up augmentation, even while denying it enough budget to hire more COs. The Hill complained that “it is the failure of leadership inside the permanent Justice Department bureaucracy — one that has served multiple presidents, Republican and Democrat — to fully address the resources and cultural deficiencies” that has resulted in the staffing crisis at BOP.

Schadenfreude aside, it is rare that media attention and Congressional hand-wringing results in changes in the BOP that positively affects staff or inmates.

Washington Post, Justice Dept. reassigns warden of jail where Epstein died, puts two staffers on leave (Aug. 13)

USA Today, Jeffrey Epstein suicide casts spotlight on federal prison system riven by staff shortages, violence, sexual harassment (Aug. 12)

Houston Chronicle, Federal New York lockup draws new scrutiny in Epstein death (Aug. 12)

Politico, Jeffrey Epstein’s guards were working extreme OT shifts (Aug. 12)

The Marshall Project, Epstein’s Death Highlights A Staffing Crisis in Federal Prisons (Aug. 14)

The New York Times, In Short-Staffed Jail, Epstein Was Left Alone for Hours; Guard Was Substitute (Aug. 12)

The Hill, Deadly déjà vu: Epstein’s prison death was decades in the making (Aug. 13)

– Thomas L. Root