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HOUSE SUBCOMMITTEE WITNESSES SAVAGE BOP’S COVID RESPONSE

Witnesses blasted BOP healthcare, CARES Act and compassionate release response, and the PATTERN score at a House of Representatives Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security hearing on what Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) called “BOP’s troubling response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its inability to protect inmates and staff adequately.”

Nadler, who is chairman of the full House Committee on the Judiciary, said the BOP has a “duty to ensure basic protections for those in our custody” and “to make sufficient use of the authority granted to it under the CARES Act to place certain prisoners at home confinement earlier than previously permitted by statute…”

Epidemiologist Homer Venters, who has inspected some 40 prisons since the pandemic began, testified that “my greatest area of concern is that pre-existing deficiencies in the health services provided to people in BOP custody which contributed to the spread and lethality of COVID-19 remain unaddressed… My investigations have real revealed a disturbing lack of access to care when a new medical problem is encountered.”

Additionally, he argued that “there’s a compelling and unrealized rationale for release of high-risk patients who pose minimal public safety risks. This approach is even more important now to consider during the omicron outbreaks because of the tremendous lack of staffing inside facilities.”

Venters faulted the lack of any independent review and assessment of reported COVID-19 deaths “including those that occurred in private facilities,” a number the BOP has been careful to erase from its count since contracts with those facilities lapsed. He argued that “the lack of independent assessment in how [inmate COVID] deaths are reviewed and more broadly the lack of meaningful oversight by a health organization” is a fundamental problem.

“Every other sector of health care in the United States has independent and professional health organizations reviewing the quality of care,” Venters told the Subcommittee, “but in the BOP and other carceral spaces we leave those crucial assessments to law enforcement to review its own provision of health care… The BOP is left to make its own assessments about the quality and scope of his health care and only sporadic investigations by the Inspector General of the Dept of Justice provide alternative viewpoints. This is wholly insufficient and leaves incarcerated people at a systemic disadvantage because the organizations and structures that measure and promote health for the rest of the nation for the rest of us are excluded from the care people receive in the BOP.”

University of Iowa law professor Allison Guernsey echoed the problems with the BOP’s self-reporting of inmate COVID numbers. “There are serious questions about the veracity of the BOP’s infection and death data. Not only do these questions cast doubt on the handling of the pandemic but they have real-world impact on the adjudication of compassionate release motions.”

She noted that the BOP has delayed reporting some COVID deaths for as much as a year, and that even now, Freedom of Information Act data she obtained from the BOP show five inmate deaths that the BOP has never publicly acknowledged. What’s more, she said, BOP numbers “don’t include anyone who died in a privately managed facility with a federal contract [which she reported totaled 17] and… it excludes people who were granted compassionate release just in time to die free.” Furthermore, she testified, “the Bureau of Prisons has admitted that its cumulative infection rate doesn’t include anyone who caught COVID and was then released from prison.”

With Guernsey’s additional numbers, the BOP’s inmate COVID death total is at least 301 inmates.

Guernsey observed that “the accuracy of the data matters” because “courts rely on it routinely in granting compassionate release, and if a judge misjudges the COVID risk based on inaccurate data, people that we know are medically vulnerable will be left in prison to die.” She asked the Subcommittee to take steps to “require the BOP to report accurate and verifiable data. We should require them to do this for deaths and for infections, and we should require the BOP to comply with the mandates already articulated in the First Step Act by requiring them to report to this Committee and Congress what they are doing with respect to compassionate release procedures.”

[Editor’s aside: If the BOP accountants who diddle daily with the agency’s COVID numbers were in private industry, they’d have done the perp walk by now.]

Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, Hearings: The First Step Act, The Pandemic, and Compassionate Release: What Are the Next Steps for the Federal Bureau of Prisons? (Jan 21)

– Thomas L. Root