Tag Archives: augmentation

Director Peters, It’s Not Like You Weren’t Warned – Update for September 15, 2023

Leave a comment

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

TOLD YOU SO

shipwreck230915When Bureau of Prisons Director Colette Peters appeared for her first oversight hearing with the Senate Committee on the Judiciary about 51 weeks ago, it was an hour and a half on the Love Boat. But it’s now clear after the beating she suffered at the Committee’s hands two days ago that her ship is taking on water and the pumps can’t keep up.

Last October, I cited the friendly advice Director Peters received from the Committee about questions from legislators. I wrote

Finally, something even Peters acknowledged to be a cautionary tale: Sens Grassley, Cotton and Jon Ossoff (D-GA) all complained to her that various letters and requests for information they have sent to the BOP have gone unanswered, sometimes for years. This was a failing that former BOP Director Carvajal was beaten up with during his tenure. Not answering the mail from pesky Senators and Representatives may seem like a small thing to BOP management – it certainly has gone on for years – but if Peters wants the Judiciary Committee lovefest to go on, she should not let her staff anger Congress over something so easily corrected. Carvajal was regularly lambasted for similar failings. Peters should profit from his example.

Alas, Director Peters does not appear to be a regular reader of this blog, because she chose not to profit. The results were predictable: When she sat in front of the Committee two days ago, Peters was lambasted by friend and foe alike for a continuation of the BOP’s sorry habit of secrecy. Written questions submitted by Committee members a year ago remain unanswered, and all she could offer the senators was a milquetoast explanation that those answers must go through a “review process” and that she was as frustrated as the Committee was.

C’mon, Colette. Who’s “reviewing” these questions, most of which call for a simple factual response? (Examples from Wednesday: How many males-turned-transgender-females have been placed in federal women’s prisons? How many COs are employed by the BOP?) Providing these answers is not rocket surgery. The numbers are the numbers. How much ‘review’ of the numbers is needed?

knifegunB170404The hearing was painful. Many of the senators seemed more concerned with scoring political points on crime and LGBTQ issues than about issues broadly important to the BOP. And Director Peters seemed woefully unprepared, relying on a series of “talking points” unresponsive to the questions she should have expected. It’s as if she brought a knife to a gunfight.

The Associated Press wrote that Peters

was scolded Wednesday by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who say her lack of transparency is hampering their ability to help fix the agency, which has long been plagued by staffing shortages, chronic violence and other problems. Senators complained that Colette Peters appears to have reneged on promises she made when she took the job last year that she’d be candid and open with lawmakers, and that ‘the buck stops’ with her for turning the troubled agency around.

After an hour and a half of senatorial belly-aching about being ghosted by Director Peters, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL), chairman of the Committee and as much a fan of Director Peters as he was a nemesis to former Director Carvajal, admonished her, “Senators take it very personally when you don’t answer their questions. More than almost any other thing that I would recommend I’d make that a high priority.”

Committee questions careened from the sublime to the absurd. Durbin observed that the Committee largely agreed that the BOP “needs significantly more funding” for staffing and infrastructure needs, including a $2 billion maintenance backlog. Peters told the Committee the BOP was studying how to reduce reliance on restrictive housing – read “solitary confinement” – and studying how other prison systems handle the issue.

cotton171204She also reported that the BOP had increased new hires by 60% and reduced quitting by 20%. Nevertheless, the agency still only has 13,000 correctional officers where 20,000 are needed, and it still relies on “augmentation,” using non-COs to fill CO shifts. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), a professional inmate-hater who wants to increase inmate populations while excoriating the BOP for being unable to manage the load with too little money and too few staff, complained that Peters had hired too few COs (the “meat eaters,” he called them) while bringing on too many non-COs (whom he derisively called “leaf eaters”).

Cotton invited Peters to accompany him on an inspection of FCC Forrest City, an invitation she accepted with a pained smile. Spending a day with Tom Cotton, the man who tried to blow up the First Step Act… almost as nice as a root canal without novacaine.

Other senators complained that the Mexican cartels might be obtaining blueprints for BOP facilities, that transgender females were being placed in BOP female facilities and sexually terrorizing female inmates (with very little said about BOP staff sexually terrorizing female inmates), and that the BOP decided that people on CARES Act home confinement were allowed to stay home (a decision made by the Dept of Justice, not the BOP).

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) invented a new word: “recidivation.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) chastised Peters for not having the facts he wanted to hear at her fingertips. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) led a Republican charge against BOP transgender policy, with more than one senator suggesting that transgender inmates number in the thousands. He also became testy when Peters failed to provide specifics about how the BOP is combatting the use of contraband phones by inmates.

Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Jon Ossoff (D-GA) asked pointed but thoughtful questions. Ossoff suggested what many have long believed, that the institution audits required by the Prison Rape Elimination Act are meaningless paper exercises. As for BOP staffing, Tillis candidly observed that hiring more COs “is our job as well as yours.”

Ossoff perhaps best summarized the flavor of the hearing when he warned Peters: “You’ve now been in the post for about a year and Congress expects results.”

Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Prisons (September 13, 2023)

Associated Press, Senators clash with US prisons chief over transparency, seek fixes for problem-plagued agency (September 13, 2023)

– Thomas L. Root

Notorious MCC Closing ‘Temporarily’… And Other BOP Follies of the Week – Update for August 30, 2021

Leave a comment

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

BOP HAS ANOTHER TOUGH NEWS WEEK

I Love New York:  The Dept. of Justice announced last Thursday that the Bureau of Prisons will “temporarily” close the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, the high-rise jail near the Federal Courthouse in lower Manhattan.

The decrepit facility, described by the New York Daily News as “dysfunctional,” has been a headline-generating public relations disaster for the BOP in the past several years.

renovate210830The closure was described as being temporary, reminiscent of restaurant “closed for renovation” announcements to mask abandonment of the premises. Indeed, the Daily News said, “Sources were skeptical the jail would ever resume operations resembling previous years, when it held 700 or more inmates.”

The decision to close comes weeks after Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco inspected the facility “given ongoing concerns,” as the DOJ said at the time.

The New York Times reported that MCC has been criticized “by inmates, lawyers and even judges for the conditions in which prisoners have been held.” It’s the prison where two COs were indicted for lying after celebrity prisoner Jeffrey Epstein, who was facing sex-trafficking charges, was found dead in his cell in August 2019 in what was ruled a suicide. In early 2020, a handgun was found in the jail during a shakedown.

In January, the facility received its fourth warden in less than two years. As the coronavirus took hold, MCC employees weren’t able to get masks and staff restrooms ran out of soap because employees charged with refilling the dispensers were pressed into duty as COs due to staff shortages. In May 2020, a court-authorized inspection found that inmates with COVID symptoms were ignored and social distancing was almost nonexistent.

Earlier this year, the MCC “was rocked by allegations that an inmate whose lawyer says he has the mental capacity of an 8-year-old child was left in a holding cell for 24 hours while awaiting a competency evaluation,” Associated Press reported. “Around the same time, a correctional officer at the facility had also reported sexual misconduct by a superior, which officials at the jail delayed reporting to senior BOP officials.”

“The MCC has been a longstanding disgrace,” New York Federal Public Defender David Patton told the Times. “It’s cramped, dark and unsanitary. The building is falling apart. Chronic shortages of medical staff mean that people suffer for long periods of time when they have urgent medical issues.” But, Mr. Patton added, MDC Brooklyn (across the river from the MCC) has many of the same problems, and if the MCC prisoners are sent there without those problems being addressed, “this move will accomplish nothing.”

frying210830Most of the 263 inmates at the MCC will be moved to MDC Brooklyn, according to Courthouse News Service, which many may seem as “out of the frying pan and into the fire.” MDC Brooklyn, where a power outage and BOP management prevarications made the news in January 2020, is still embroiled in a lawsuit brought by the NY Federal Public Defender accusing the BOP of “false statements and stonewalling” by “refusing to provide detailed or accurate information about the conditions at MDC” during the power outage. The district court in which the suit is being heard has appointed former US Attorney General Loretta Lynch as mediator in the case.

You may recall that last April, US District Court Judge Colleen McMahon said that both MCC and MDC are “run by morons.” During a sentencing proceeding, McMahon castigated the BOP, saying the agency’s ineptitude and failure to “do anything meaningful” at the two facilities amounted to the “single thing in the five years that I was chief judge of this court that made me the craziest.”

Lynch said Friday her team has been conducting “stress tests” at MDC Brooklyn to better understand problems there, such as how to improve scheduling of in-person visits. She said the BOP and inmates should anticipate that moving additional prisoners to the Brooklyn facility will “create its own ‘stress test,’ separate and apart from the ones that we have been using,” she said.

horrendous210830Southern Comfort:  Meanwhile, Forbes published a piece last Monday describing the horrific conditions at what is left of FCI Estill after the prison was damaged by a tornado nearly 18 months ago. About 1,000 medium-security prisoners were relocated, but 66 minimum-security inmates remain, having been moved into the medium-security facility. “When the Campers arrived at the FCI, floors were covered in water, urine and feces,” Forbes reported. “Toilets were clogged, black mold and mildew could be seen throughout the facility. The vents were filthy and covered in black soot. Debris from the remaining infrastructure hung from the ceiling. Medications were suspended to inmates and anxiety ran high over COVID-19 outbreaks. The only hope for these remaining inmates was that these conditions would be short-lived and some normalcy to prison life would return. However, not much has changed in the 16 months since and these men still live in inhumane conditions.”

While the inmate count fell by 95%, “the staffing level of the facility has remained roughly the same as it was prior to the tornado (approximately 221).” That would seem to be 221 employees who could be used elsewhere…

Take This Job and Shove It:  Is it any wonder BOP employees are quitting in droves? That’s the question Business Insider asked last week. “About 3,700 staffers left the BOP from March 2020 to July 3, 2021, according to agency data… That translates to the equivalent of more than 8.4 employees departing every day during that period… Current departure numbers are even more striking because the overall number of BOP employees isn’t going up — it’s going down. In 2015, there were 37,258 employees, according to a Government Accountability Office analysis of the agency’s employment data. By 2017, that number dropped to 35,569. In 2019, it stood at 34,857.”

So much for the BOP’s much-ballyhooed hiring initiative…

job210830The COVID-19 pandemic and augmentation have increasingy strained prison workers, which could cause more prison workers to quit as staffing conditions continue to erode, union representatives told Business Insider. “I was mentally stressed out and physically drained at the end of the day,” a former custody officer at the US Penitentiary, Thomson, facility in the northwestern region of Illinois, said. “I used to dread going to work. There were way too many inmates for the amount of stuff that’s there.”

New York Daily News, NYC federal jail where Jeffrey Epstein killed himself to close (August 26, 2021)

New York Times, Justice Dept. to Close Troubled Jail Where Jeffrey Epstein Died (August 26, 2021)

The Hill, DOJ to ‘at least temporarily’ close jail where Jeffrey Epstein died (August 26, 2021)

Associated Press, U.S. Is Closing The Troubled NYC Jail Where Jeffrey Epstein Killed Himself (August 26, 2021)

Courthouse News Service, Manhattan jail closure renews concerns over Brooklyn facility conditions (August 27, 2021)

Forbes, Federal Inmates Live In Deplorable Conditions A Year After Tornado Destroyed Most of FCI Estill (August 23, 2021)

Business Insider, Unrest at the big house: federal prison workers are fed up, burned out, and heading for the exits (August 25, 2021)

– Thomas L. Root

Will BOP Director Carvajal Be The Next One to Be Sent Home? – Update for June 29, 2021

Leave a comment

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

SOME BOP HONCHOS GET EARLY RELEASE, AND CARVAJAL MAY BE NEXT

hitroad210629The Associated Press reported last Wednesday that two Federal Bureau of Prisons Regional Directors have been relieved of their posts. Senior Biden administration officials are also considering replacing Director Michael Carvajal, whom the AP describes as being “at the center” of the “beleaguered agency’s myriad crises.”

The discussions about whether to fire Carvajal are in the preliminary stages and a final decision hasn’t yet been made, AP said it had been told by two people familiar with the matter. They were not authorized to publicly discuss the internal talks and spoke on condition of anonymity.

However, AP reported, “there’s an indication that the bureau is shaking up its senior ranks following growing criticism of chronic mismanagement, blistering reports from the Justice Department’s inspector general, and a bleak financial outlook.”

shocked191024Mismanagement at the BOP? I’m shocked.

“Since the death of Jeffrey Epstein at a federal lockup in New York in August 2019,” the AP claimed, “Associated Press has exposed one crisis after another, including rampant spread of coronavirus inside prisons and a failed response to the pandemic, escapes, deaths and critically low staffing levels that have hampered responses to emergencies.”

At least two regional directors, officials in charge of institutions in the South Central and the Southeast regions are also being replaced. BOP said the two regional directors — Juan Baltazar, Jr. and J.A. Keller — are retiring and had been planning to do so. But the sudden removal apparently was not the testimonial dinner and gold watch the two had anticipated: other people familiar with the matter said that neither had planned to leave for months and were told other officials were being appointed to their jobs.

On Wednesday, AP said, the BOP announced it was appointing wardens William Lothrop and Heriberto Tellez to the regional posts. Tellez, one of the “morons” recently referred to by Senior US District Judge Colleen McMahon, is currently in charge of MDC Brooklyn, the high-rise dungeon where a 34-year-old inmate was found dead in his cell as recently as a week ago.

Carvajal took over as director in February 2020, a month before COVID-19 began galloping through all 122 of the BOP’s facilities, infecting over 48,000 inmates and killing 255.

reel210629To be sure, the Director does not have a lot of highlights on his reel.  Nearly a third of BOP correctional officer jobs are vacant, forcing the BOP to continue to use augmentation, pressing medical, educational, office, and other staff into temporary CO duty.

Some question whether the staffing shortage will prevent the agency from maintaining security and at the same time carrying out its First Step Act programming duties. Over the past 18 months, 30 prisoners have escaped from federal lockups across the U.S. — and nearly half still have not been caught. The AP said prisoners have broken out at lockups in nearly every region of the country.

The Bureau has said it expects to bring on 1,800 new employees, and that its recent hiring initiative has been “a huge success.” But the AP reports the BOP has been slow-walking its hiring process, pausing most new hires until at least October. Officers at several facilities have held protests calling for Carvajal to be fired.

Late last week, Shane Fausey, national president of the Council of Prison Locals, AFL-CIO (representing 30,000 BOP employees) told Politico, “A clear and dangerous staffing crisis in the Bureau of Prisons, as explicitly outlined in a number of OIG reports and a recent scathing report by the GAO, has pushed this agency beyond its limits. Our employees and officers continue to endure unrelenting overtime and reassignments as the budgetary shortfall is preventing the hiring of much needed Correctional Officers.”

Meanwhile, President Biden’s detailed 2022 BOP budget request does not throw the BOP a life preserver. It includes a reduction of $267 million to reflect decreases in the BOP’s inmate population — a decrease that is a result, in part, of the CARES Act and increased use of the Elderly Offenders Home Detention program.

Jail151220But it’s not just the staff shortage and cash crunch. The BOP continues to be plagued by embarrassing allegations of misconduct. Although this predates Carvajal’s administration, a loaded gun was found smuggled into MCC New York not long after Epstein committed suicide. In the last month, the DOJ Inspector General issued a report about security lapses at BOP minimum-security facilities. Last week, the family of Jamel Floyd – who died a year ago at MDC Brooklyn after being pepper-sprayed by guards (only a few months before scheduled release after 15 years) – sued the BOP.

The Floyd suit came only a few days after a suit filed in Denver by BOP employees alleged that USP Florence special operations (SORT) team members fired pepper spray, plastic bullets, and pepper balls at their unarmed, administrative colleagues during a training exercise, in “inappropriate and dangerous” training episodes. Those failings prompted the DOJ Inspector General to recommend that some of its special operations training be suspended until better safeguards could be put in place.

“We believe that staff members at the Bureau of Prisons abused their coworkers in a way that undermines, or should undermine, the faith of the public in the ability to do their jobs,” said attorney Ed Aro, who is representing four current and former Bureau of Prison employees who say they were injured and traumatized by the training.

Last week, Vanity Fair published a long piece chronicling pretrial detainee Ghislaine Maxwell’s complaints about inhumane treatment at MCC New York.

And we end with an Eastern District of Virginia federal judge last week angrily and publicly blaming the BOP for the suicide death of a presentence defendant.

angryjudge190822The man had been sent to FMC Butner – a BOP medical and psychiatric center – for a mental evaluation. He was declared competent to enter a plea and returned to a local jail. After the man pled guilty but before sentencing, Judge T.S. Ellis III again became concerned about the man’s mental health and ordered him back to FMC Butner for further care.  BOP officials refused him unless the defendant was deemed incompetent again or required a new psychiatric evaluation. So the defendant went to a local jail where he took his own life on May 18.

At a hearing on June 24, the judge excoriated the BOP for refusing to take the man and failing to provide his medical records to the local jail. “If I issue an order, you must obey it,” he told prison officials who participated in the hearing. “Nobody in the Bureau of Prisons should ever decide they don’t want to obey my order because they think it violates the law. I trump their view of the law.”

Welcome to the culture of the BOP, Your Honor.

Associated Press, AP sources: Officials mulling ousting US prisons director (June 23, 2021)

Newsweek, Trump-Appointed Bureau of Prisons Director Michael Carvajal Could Be Replaced Amid Crises (June 23, 2021)

Midnight Report, Federal Bureau of Prisons Oust Regional Directors in South Central and Southeast Regions (June 23, 2021)

Time, After His 2020 Death in a New York Jail Cell, Jamel Floyd’s Family File Lawsuit Against Bureau of Prisons (June 24, 2021)

Denver Post, Supermax special ops team used pepper spray, plastic bullets on unarmed colleagues during training exercise, lawsuit alleges (June 23, 2021)

Politico, Union boss: Bureau of Prisons faces dangerous cash crunch (June 25, 2021)

Vanity Fair, Inside Ghislaine Maxwell’s Battle With the Bureau of Prisons (June 24, 2021)

Washington Post, Judge faults federal prison system after suicide of Great Falls man (June 25, 2021)

– Thomas L. Root

DOJ Says It Will Meet First Step Act July 19th Deadline for Risk System, Good Time Calculations – Update July 15, 2019

Leave a comment

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

WHO’DA THOUGHT?

The First Step Act set a hard deadline of 210 days after passage – July 19, 2019 – for recalculating the 7-days-a-year extra good time and for Dept of Justice to adopt a new risk assessment program to be used by the BOP.

deadline190715Now, against the odds, the Attorney General says DOJ and BOP will meet the July 19 deadline for extra good time and adoption of a risk assessment system, despite DOJ blowing the deadline for setting up a risk assessment committee last winter because of the government shutdown.

USA Today and the AP both report that DOJ is expected to lay out the risk assessment rules on July 19, as required by First Step.

Adoption of the risk assessment program is critical, because once it is in place, the BOP then has six months to roll out the programs it identifies as like to reduce recidivism. Eligible inmates taking those programs will earn additional good time at the rate of from 10 to 15 days a month.

No one yet knows what programs will be eligible, but First Step encourages the BOP to be expansive, maybe even including some kinds of inmate employment. Every day I hear from people wondering whether ACE (adult continuing education) or required GED classes or UNICOR employment or even prison orderly jobs will earn extra good time. No one yet knows. But with the risk assessment program in place, the BOP will begin to identify what will and will not count.

July 19th reportedly will see release of about 2,200 additional federal inmates based on the 7-days-a-year good time being awarded for every year of one’s sentence. Fox News reported last Monday that July “will see the largest group to be freed so far under a clause in the First Step Act that reduces sentences due to “earned good time.” In addition to family reunification, the formerly incarcerated citizens, 90 percent of whom have been African-American, hope to get employment opportunities touted by Trump last month at the White House as part of the “Second Chance” hiring program.”

norose190715All is not roses with the earned time program, however. FAMM president Kevin Ring said last week that more attention and money is needed to support the new programs. FAMM is also unhappy that a long list of inmates, including those convicted of terrorism, sex crimes, some gun offenses, some fraud crimes and a few drug offenses will be excluded from qualifying for earned time credits. “There is going to be some frustration,” Ring said.

Acting BOP Director Hugh Hurwitz also acknowledged that the exclusions represent a looming inmate management test for prison staffers. “How do you manage inmates who are getting the credits and those who are not? That will be a challenge as we roll this out,” Hurwitz said.

The roll-out comes at a time when the BOP is grappling with persistent staffing shortages. To make up for a shortage of COs, officials have ordered teachers, nurses, kitchen workers and other staffers to serve as correctional officers. The practice, known as augmentation, draws staff away from the kinds of programs that officials are now touting.

Newly-installed Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who toured FCI Englewood last week, admitted First Step provisions “will put additional demands” on prison staffers. He told USA Today that DOJ was reviewing staffing across the BOP, but he believed that current personnel levels were not jeopardizing safety.

multi190715“Everyone who is trained to work at a federal prison learns to participate in the security role,” Rosen said. “But we’re looking at that and plan to do whatever makes sense.”

A number of advocates, however, have called for stronger oversight of the implementation by both BOP and the AG’s office, and for more funding. “We have concerns it might not be implemented appropriately,” said Inimai Chettiar, legislative and policy director at the Justice Action Network.

USA Today, Roofing, paving, artisanal bread: Feds look to kick-start law that will free hundreds of inmates (July 11)

Aiken Standard, A.G. William Barr, Sens. Graham, Scott laud First Step Act during Edgefield prison visit (July 12)

Associated Press, Around 2,200 federal inmates to be released under reform law (July 13)

Fox News, Thousands of ex-prisoners to reunite with their families this month (July 8)

– Thomas L. Root

BOP Director Has a Bad Day on Capitol Hill – Update for April 23, 2018

Leave a comment

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

LISAStatHeader2small
BOP DIRECTOR SAYS THERE’S NOTHING BETTER COMING ON HALFWAY HOUSE

punchinface180423Talk about violence directed at BOP employees… Director Mark Inch was beaten up pretty well last week when he delivered his largely fact-free report on the BOP to the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations, with the chief executive at the BOP Coleman complex likely to have been taking it on the chin as soon as Inch could get out of the hearing room door.

We thought we were the only ones who found Director Inch’s obsequious and bureaucratic delivery tedious, but it became clear during his nearly 2-hour session that the Committee members were a little frustrated at Inch’s habit of turning every answer into a pretzel and coming up short on meaningful data about his agency.

Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) asked about the cancellation of 16 halfway house contracts, and demanded Inch square that with the shortage of halfway house bed space nationwide. Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-New York) cited the prior BOP director’s complaint that it is “scarce and expensive” to put people in halfway house, and demanded that Inch to explain the cancellations in light of the scarcity.

halfway161117In response to a question from Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) on BOP halfway house plans, Inch said the BOP spent $350 million on halfway house at 230 centers nationwide last year. Of the approximately 44,000 inmates released annually, he said, 80% get halfway house or home confinement placement. Inch said that reentry centers are “mostly important for inmates at the high end” of sentences.

In 2017, Inch said, the BOP overspent for halfway house and exceeded contractual limits on some locations while others were underused. He anticipated the halfway house placement will remain unchanged in 2018. “The challenges I look at – the constellation of our residential reentry centers is two things, is to the extent of how far out it can spread and the cost that is associated with it – our goal this year in 2018, is to have very clear usage figures data against the ascribed budget so I can make very logical budget requests in the future.”

Stripped of bureaucratic–speak, that means nothing is going to change in BOP halfway house placement any time soon.

work180423The representatives, who have been hearing loud complaints from their BOP employee-constituents, also pushed Inch hard on augmentation, the BOP practice of using noncustody people like nurses, teachers and front-office workers in CO positions. Inch assured the Subcommittee that all of the 6,000 BOP positions being eliminated this fiscal years were vacant, and not the reason for augmentation. The director told the Subcommittee that “a lot” of the BOP staffers used for augmentation had started their careers as COs, and thus were well qualified to fill in on custody positions.

Despite union protests and Federal Labor Relations Authority rulings in favor of BOP employees, the Director insisted that augmentation was safe for employees. “You say it’s not a dangerous situation?” Rep. Michael Johnson (R-Louisiana) asked Inch incredulously. “I’ve met with a number of these [BOP] people from my home state of Louisiana, and they’re not comfortable with this situation.”

At one point in the hearing, Inch was blindsided by charges the BOP was banning books, an allegation arising from a policy being adopted by the Coleman, Florida, federal prison complex. The Coleman policy, which goes into effect next week, bans purchase of any books except those bought through the commissary for a 30% surcharge over list.

ban180423Congresswoman Karen Bass (D-California), who apparently believed the policy was a BOP ban on books, asked the Director how he could adopt such a policy. Inch seemed nonplussed, saying he was unaware of the Coleman policy and would look into it. He suggested Rep. Bass’s understanding of the policy might be a misperception, leading her to snap back, “I hope you follow up with Coleman, because this does not seem to be a misperception, this seems to be a directive.”

In point of fact, the Coleman policy is a book ban of sorts, because every inmate book request is filter through a BOP employee, who could simply refuse to honor a request for a book the BOP felt was inappropriate for whatever reason.

We suspect the Coleman warden, who appears to have violated the sacred bureaucratic rule of “don’t make your boss look bad,” got an unpleasant call from the Director about five minutes after the hearing ended.

House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Oversight, Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Prisons (Apr. 17, 2018)

– Thomas L. Root

LISAStatHeader2small