We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING
Donald Trump, a guy readers have a lot of common with – felony convictions – has been elected as the 47th President of the United States. Last week, I had more than a few emails from prisoners excited about his election.
I am not sure why, but at the same time, I am not sure that his re-election is bad for prisoners. Trump loved using private prisons (their stock jumped an average of 37% last week) and putting federal prisoners to death. In July 2020, he resumed federal executions for the first time in 17 years, killing 13 federal prisoners in six months. However, Trump also signed the First Step Act, the biggest piece of federal criminal justice reform in over 50 years, if not ever.
Trump is a wild card. A lot of what happens on anything “will depend on his priorities or even whims,” as The Reload put it last weekend. Trump officials from his last administration told the Washington Post that Trump initially refused to support the initiative but changed his mind only after senior aides predicted it would better his standing in 2020 among Black voters. “Months later,” the Post reported, “when that failed to materialize, Trump ‘went shithouse crazy,’ one former official said, yelling at aides, ‘Why the hell did I do that?’”
So what do the next four years hold for criminal justice reform and the Federal Bureau of Prisons?
So far this week, we have considered Trump and firearms (Tuesday), Trump and marijuana (Wednesday), and yesterday, we looked at sentence reform and clemency. Today, we consider Trump and the BOP.
THE FUTURE OF THE BOP
With cost-cutting a part of the Trump agenda, the BOP is primed to take it on the chin. There should be more pressure to reduce prison populations, Walter Pavlo said last week in Forbes, which could be good news for those who are eligible for First Step Act credits. At the same time, Trump could restart use of private prisons, particularly for deportable immigrants.
Trump instituted a hiring freeze when he took office in 2017, and sought a cut of over 6,000 BOP jobs in a 2018 DOJ plan. In 2018 – when Trump made the BOP cuts – the agency had a $7.1 billion budget. The BOP has asked for $8.6 billion 
in FY2025 and another $3 billion to repair crumbling infrastructure. Pavlo said, “Spending at these levels is simply not going to happen.”
In the waning days of Trump’s last administration, the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel issued a memorandum calling for the return of those prisoners on CARES Act. home confinement to prison when the pandemic ended. Eleven months later, the OLC (now run by a Biden DOJ) rescinded the directive. As of last January, there were still 2,656 prisoners on CARES Act, 117 of whom had 5 years or more remaining on their sentences.
No one other than Pavlo has speculated publicly that Trump might have his DOJ reinstitute the January 2021 OLC memo.
Finally, how about BOP Director Colette Peters? One can easily see Trump’s anti-woke people bridling at calling inmates “AICs,” or “adults in custody.” If that’s enough for Trump to want the headache of replacing her – after all, he struggled with replacing a string of BOP heads during Trump I – then she will be gone. She may be too far down the food chain for him to worry about.
How she does with her new boss, for now the suspected sex criminal Matt Gaetz, remains to be seen.
Forbes, The Bureau of Prisons Under A Trump Administration (November 7, 2024)
Vice, Trump’s cuts to federal prison system “decimate” jobs (February 13, 2018)
– Thomas L. Root