We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

SPENDING MORE ON LESS

USA Facts last week issued a fact sheet on the BOP, reporting that the agency spent a net total of $9.13 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2025, a full 20% of the Dept of Justice’s budget. Only the FBI ($11.2 billion) spent more.

Since 1980, BOP spending has increased about 550% while overall Federal spending has increased 200%. Meanwhile, the number of federal employees working for the Bureau of Prisons has decreased 10.6% since 2012.

In a Substack article, former DOJ official Jonathan Wroblewski argued in favor of the BOP’s decision to close FCC Beaumont Low, FCI Big Spring, FCI La Tuna, the women’s satellite camp at FMC Lexington in Kentucky, FCC Petersburg Low in Virginia, and already-vacant FCI Taft in California (with camps at Morgantown and Duluth being converted into low-security prisons). The BOP has said the decision is borne of necessity due to “longstanding infrastructure and staffing challenges” and a deferred-maintenance backlog that now exceeds $4 billion.

Wroblewski argues that it’s more than that. The Government’s “Smart on Crime” policy adopted in 2013, aimed at reducing the number of BOP prisoners, has reduced the BOP population by about 30%. Yet,

[d]espite the success of the initiative, there is one thing I have found disturbing. Even with 65,000 fewer prisoners than back in 2013, the Bureau of Prisons operates more prisons today than it did when Smart on Crime was announced — roughly 126 institutions now, against about 120 then. Fewer prisoners, more prisons. The system shed nearly a third of its population and somehow expanded its physical footprint. Part of the explanation is timing; facilities authorized and financed during the long boom kept opening after the population had already begun to fall. But most of it is plain institutional inertia. A prison, once built and staffed, becomes a constituency unto itself — jobs, contracts, a fixture of the local economy, a web of interests that does not dissolve simply because the beds have emptied. So the BOP did what bureaucracies do: it spread a shrinking population thinner and thinner across a growing, aging inventory of buildings.

The $4 billion maintenance backlog is, in part, the bill for keeping all of them open. This is why closing prisons is not a betrayal of the reform. It is its completion. The argument we made in 2013 was that money sunk into unnecessary incarceration is money stolen from more effective public safety… Every dollar BOP spends heating, patching, and minimally staffing an institution it no longer needs is a dollar it cannot spend on the officers it is desperate to hire, on the treatment and reentry programming the First Step Act promised, or on the upkeep that keeps its remaining prisons safe and decent.

In Real Clear Politics, Mark Levin and Khalil Cumberbatch of the Council on Criminal Justice echoed the sentiment: “Closing these facilities is the fiscally conservative move, and the real prize is not just the savings. It is what those savings can buy: stronger staffing and better programming at the prisons that remain… Every dollar not spent maintaining an empty 90-year-old prison is a dollar available to recruit and retain officers, while thousands of correctional posts sit vacant, and to expand the programs that can’t accommodate all prisoners striving to earn credits toward release.”

Of course, the BOP is proceeding with plans for a new prison in Letcher County, Kentucky, and President Trump has not publicly abandoned his billion-dollar plan to reopen Alcatraz Island as federal maximum-security prison (although, mercifully, there have been no rumblings about it since last spring). How those plans square with the BOP’s need for less and to repair what it has is unclear. But then, clarity in spending is not something this government is known for.

USA Facts, What does the Bureau of Prisons do? (Aug 6, 2026)

Substack, The Prisons We No Longer Need (Aug 2, 2026)

Real Clear Politics, Closing Federal Prisons: A Winning Hand (Aug 15, 2026)

~ Thomas L. Root