We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
BOP STAFFING, PRISON CONDITIONS TAKE IT ON THE CHIN
Last week was a bad one, publicity-wise, for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. First, The New York Times reported that a shortage of correctional officers has grown chronic under President Trump, leading to an increase in assaults on staff and contraband. Then, a New York City magazine ran a hard-hitting story on the deplorable conditions at MCC New York.
The Times said correctional officer vacancies has ballooned to over 2,100 (about 12% of the CO workforce). As a result, the paper said, “the practice of drawing upon other workers has become routine — many prisons have been operating in a perpetual state of staffing turmoil, leaving some workers feeling ill-equipped and unsafe on the job.”
In Obama’s last two years, the BOP hired 2,644 new Cos in 2016. Last year, the number dropped to 372, with the BOP eliminating about 5,000 unfilled jobs, including about 1,500 CO positions.
Cuts are occurring even though Congress increased the BOP budget for salaries and expenses by $106 million this year, and lawmakers have called for hiring more COs. As of March, there were 15,927 officers in federal prisons.
A BOP press officer said the cuts “will not have a negative impact on public safety or on our ability to maintain a safe environment for staff and inmates.” But assaults on prison staff have risen more than 8% last year over the previous year.
Meanwhile, The Gothamist (a magazine published by public radio station WNYC) last week savaged conditions at MCC New York. The article described “a rat-infested, high-rise hell just yards from the federal courts… That could be exactly the way jailers and prosecutors want it. Pre-trial detention, which often lasts years, can become not only unsafe, but coercive; as a result, individuals are pressured to provide information to prosecutors or accept plea deals in their desperation to be released, say former prisoners.”
“You want to plead guilty and get out of this dump to a prison,” one former inmate told the magazine. “The feds have a 98% conviction rate for a reason,”, another former prisoner said. “They mentally break you… There are certain things that go on in these places that the government covers so the public would never know.”
We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
BOP DIRECTOR QUIT BECAUSE OF SESSIONS AND KUSHNER
As we reported last week, BOP director Mark Inch quietly resigned, ironically packing up his office a week ago last Friday even as President Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was praising Inch’s leadership during a White House conference on prison reform. At the time, no one knew why he quit.
Now we do. The New York Times reported late last Thursday that Inch, a retired Army major general who had been appointed to oversee the Bureau just nine months ago, felt marginalized by Kushner’s prison reform planning, according to three unnamed sources the Times said had with knowledge of the situation. But even more than his ire at Kushner, Inch – a consummate bureaucrat – was frustrated with his boss, Attorney General Sessions, and believed he was in caught in the crossfire of a turf war between Kushner and Sessions, like Ben Franklin’s proverbial “mouse between two cats.”
Sessions had frozen Inch out of budget, staffing, and policy decisions, the Times reported, refusing even to approve his choice for deputy prisons director, the Times reports. For months Inch pleaded with Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein to install Sara M. Revell, North Central Region director, as his top deputy. Rosenstein repeatedly told Inch that Sessions had not yet approved the appointment. Inch reportedly resented Sessions’ habit of communicating with him through junior DOJ lawyers.
Inch also told Rosenstein he was tired of the Trump administration flouting “departmental norms,” and he was frustrated by Sessions trying to thwart Kushner’s reforms. This hardly meant that Inch was a fan of the FIRST STEP Act, however: the Times said Inch objected to the Kushner-backed requirement that inmates be placed in prisons within 500 miles of their homes. He also believed the FIRST STEP earned-credits program for more halfway house was impractical, in part because of a lack of available beds in halfway houses.
Mostly, it seems Inch was offended that he was largely excluded from discussion of prison reform bill. Even that shutout appears to have been engineered by Sessions. Two senior White House officials said Kushner made a point of inviting Inch to prison reform meetings, but Sessions often sent other officials in his place.
The Times said Inch – whose career was spent in the Army criminal justice and prison system – struggled to publicly explain the BOP’s response to sexual harassment, halfway house and staffing problems. Watching Inch testify before Congress was like getting a tooth pulled without novocaine. The director practiced James H. Boren’s bureaucrat’s creed: “When in doubt, mumble; when in trouble, delegate; when in charge, ponder.”
We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
BOP DIRECTOR SUDDENLY QUITS – MARKY, WE HARDLY KNEW YE…
Last Friday, at about the same time Trump advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner was praising Bureau of Prisons Director Mark Inch’s accomplishments at a White House prison reform summit, Inch was signing his resignation letter. What no one knows is why.
Inch, who as Commanding General of the Army’s Criminal Investigation and Corrections Commands, was the Army’s top cop. Inch served as an MP for 35 years, being promoted into flag ranks without ever serving in a combat unit. At Congressional hearings, he impressed us as little more than a Power Point Ranger (a derisive Army term for an officer who is more at home delivering Power Point briefings to fellow bureaucrat officers than schlepping his TA-50 and an M4 with a command of soldiers). Inch, whose uniform – bereft of any device suggesting he’d gotten within hearing distance of combat or, for that matter, had any appreciable warfighting training at all – even drew scorn from members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last April for his lack of information and evasive answers to the committee members’ questions. And these people are politicians who steep in bullshit every day.
To be sure, General Inch seems to have pulled off a classic seagull mission – fly in, crap all over everything, fly out again. Halfway house time was slashed during his watch. In the Second Chance Act, Congress increased the amount of halfway house the BOP could authorize for an inmate from six to 12 months. Now, with eight months of Inch’s leadership, the BOP has people who served 15 years plus lucky to get 90 days to transition from prison to self-reliance and employment. Last summer, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III picked Inch to clean up the BOP, but if anything, controversy surrounding the agency only increased since that time. While there has been strong media implication the BOP’s hard times caused Inch’s resignation, there is no direct evidence that this is so.
The New York Times reported that “it was not immediately clear why Mr. Inch, a retired Army major general who had joined the bureau in September, resigned.” USA Today called him “director of the embattled federal Bureau of Prisons.” The Washington Times referred to him as “the embattled director” of the BOP.
The Times noted the BOP “has been the target of a probe by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. For the past year, the bureau has been dogged by sexual harassment staffing shortages. An April USA Today article alleged the bureau had used hundreds of staffers to fill guard posts because of shortages and overtime rules.”
Hugh Hurwitz, former BOP assistant director for reentry programs, will step in as acting director. Hurwitz is pretty much a BOP lifer, having started his career as a law clerk in the Bureau’s office of the general counsel in 1988.
We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
BOP REVERSES COURSE ON BOOK LIMITATIONS
Next to watching the FBI walk a Bureau of Prisons employee off the premises in handcuffs, there is nothing BOP management hates more than congressional heat. Last week provided a perfect illustration of that basic truth, as the BOP hastily reversed a controversial policy that had was making it harder and more expensive for inmates to receive books by banning direct delivery through the mail from publishers, bookstores and book clubs.
The policy banned books from outside sources, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Instead, prisoners would have had to submit a request to purchase books through an ordering system run by the commissary in which they would pay list price, shipping and a 30% markup, and could buy hardcover books only, according to memos distributed in at least three BOP facilities. Under the new protocol, a book Amazon might sell for as little as $11.76, including shipping, could cost more than $26.00.
The book policy has been in effect at USP Atwater since last October, USP Victorville since February, and reportedly at USP Lee as well. But the issue only erupted publicly last month at House oversight hearings on the BOP, where Director Inch had his head handed to him by Congresswoman Karen Bass, who raised the issue of the policy being implemented at USP Coleman and lambasted the Director for adopting a policy that seemingly banned books.
We reported last month that Inch seemed nonplussed, saying he was unaware of the Coleman policy and would look into it. When he suggested Rep. Bass might misunderstand the policy, she shot back, “I hope you follow up with Coleman, because this does not seem to be a misperception, this seems to be a directive.”
At the time, we figured the Coleman warden’s new policy was a frolic that the Central Office might not know anything about, but the fact that the policy has been on a slow-walk rollout at joints in California, Virginia and Florida suggests that Director Inch’s denial of knowledge about the book restriction might be less than candid.
After the House hearings raised the book restriction issue, The Washington Post followed up, asking the BOP for the identity of the book vendor the BOP would use, the markup and the rationale for the restriction. The Central Office refused to say, but told the Post in an email last Thursday that the BOP had rescinded the memos and will review the policy to “ensure we strike the right balance between maintaining the safety and security of our institutions and inmate access to correspondence and reading materials.”
“You shouldn’t have to be rich to read,” complained Tara Libert, whose D.C.-based Free Minds Book Club has had reading material returned from two California prisons in recent months and has stopped shipping to two others because of the policy.
So the complaints went from inmates to families to congressional representatives to the media, demonstrating that if the issue is right, even the people who seem to have no power can end up making government accountable.
We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
BOP DIRECTOR SAYS THERE’S NOTHING BETTER COMING ON HALFWAY HOUSE
Talk 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.
In 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.
The 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.
Congresswoman 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.
We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
THE HARVEST IS GREAT, BUT THE LABORERS ARE FEW AT BOP, DOJ
USA Todayreported last week that hundreds of secretaries, teachers, counselors, cooks and medical staffers were tapped last year to fill CO posts across the BOP because of acute officer shortages and overtime limits. The assignments, known as “augmentation,” were made despite warnings that the assignments placed unprepared employees at risk.
As recently as last July, a House committee told the agency to “curtail its over-reliance” on augmentation, once reserved only for emergency operations. Instead, the practice has become common at some institutions where even s plumbers, electrical workers, budget analysts and commissary staffers have been patrolling prison yards and filling officer vacancies in maximum-security units. “While BOP reports that there is a higher incidences of serious assaults by inmates on staff at high and medium security institutions than at the lower security facilities, to meet staffing needs the BOP still routinely uses a process called augmentation whereby a non-custody employee is assigned custody responsibilities,” the Senate Appropriations Committee reported last summer.
The BOP told USA Today that all employees are regarded as “correctional workers first.”
Worker shortages abound, and not just at BOP. The Washington Postreported last week that the sudden departure of the Justice Dept’s No. 3 official is adding to the turmoil at an agency already lacking permanent leaders for important divisions.
Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand resigned, reportedly because she did not want to be sucked into the Robert Mueller Russia investigation, to take a position in Walmart’s legal department. Meanwhile, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is blaming a single Republican senator, Cory Gardner of Colorado, for blocking confirmations of key figures, including the head of DOJ’s criminal divisions, over Session’s memo lifting Obama-era protections for states that have legalized marijuana.
Twelve U.S. Attorney picks still await confirmation, and 36 more have yet to be nominated. That’s a problem for DOJ, because, as an ex-official put it, “if someone is perceived as temporary and doesn’t have the full legitimacy that comes with Senate confirmation, they are less able to successfully advocate the interests and positions of their agency to the rest of the government.”
We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
FCC HOLDS MEETING ON BLOCKING PRISON CELLPHONES
Just this week, two officers at South Mississippi Correctional Institution in Greene Countywere arrestedafter they were caught with contraband during the first major shakedown of the year under Operation Zero Tolerance. And in California, Federal officials using a task force of 750 officersrounded up dozens of suspectsearly Wednesday to disrupt what they described as a massive street and prison gang conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin using social media, coordinated between street gangs and prison gang leaders who used cellphones smuggled into prisons to coordinate their activities.
All of this points to the serious problem prison officials have combatting the infiltration of cellphones into facilities. But BOP officials and members of Congress say they’re hopeful that a meeting last week with wireless industry representatives will lead to a solution that combats security issues posed by cellphones in prison. The Federal Communications Commission hosted the meeting, making good on a promise last year by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to help facilitate conversation among law enforcement, prisons officials and wireless providers to address the issue that corrections officers say is their chief safety threat behind bars.
Prisons officials say cellphones — smuggled into institutions by the thousands, by visitors, employees, and even delivered by drone — are dangerous because inmates use them to carry out crimes and plot violence both inside and outside prison. The FCC has said it can’t permit jamming in state prisons, but it has permitted a test of signal blocking at FCI Frostburg in January. Wireless industry groups oppose jamming. In a letter filed with the FCC last month, a trade group wrote that court orders should be required to shut down devices in prison.
“I am encouraged by how seriously the FCC is taking the issue of contraband cell phones in prisons,” Congressman David Kustoff (R-Tennessee) told The Associated Press. “I look forward to the telecommunications industry working with state corrections officials to put a stop to this concerning public safety threat.” Kustoff has been among those pushing for a fix to the phone problem. He spoke with AP after being briefed by his state prisons director, who was one of several attending the meeting.
Representatives from the U.S. Department of Justice and BOP attended the meeting, as did Congressman Mark Sanford (R-South Carolina), who has spoken out about the issue of cellphones in prison since his time as South Carolina’s governor from 2002 to 2010.
The FCC has been softening on the jamming issue, thanks to persistent pleas from state and federal officials. The BOP test in January, is said to have been successful. Previously, the problem has been how to jam the illegal cell phone signals inside the prison but not interfere with legitimate cell signals just outside the prison walls, such as those from first responders. Proponents of the latest tests say the technology has advanced and the range is now more predictable. Assistant U.S. Attorney General Beth Williams told AP that the test represented “a big step” and could lead to the broader use of such technologies.
We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
BOP REVERSES “ARMED CHAPLAIN” RULE
A BOP prison chaplain’s quest to disarm chaplains won out, as the agency announced last month that chaplains will no longer be required to carry pepper spray.
Last November, the agency agreed that Rev. Ronald Apollo, a retired Air Force chaplain now serving as a BOP chaplain did not have to carry pepper spray. Earlier last year, the BOP had mandated that all workers in medium and high security institutions to carry around spray last year, prompted by a federal law passed in 2015 to keep prison staff safe. Rev. Apollo refused, arguing the rule violated his religious beliefs and jeopardized the impartiality he needs to counsel prisoners and win their trust.
BOP’s personnel classifications exempt chaplains from firearms training and hold that “in the event of an actual disturbance the professional skills of a chaplain will be applied in another way.” Rev. Apollo argued that requiring him to carry spray violated he classification and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.
“Now we are able to work on a level to do everything we could do before, in the same capacity, exactly how we were doing it before when… spray was never an issue,” Rev. Apollo said. “We still respond to alarms, we still preach, we could counsel and we’re free to go about all areas of the institution like the ministers we were hired to be without any reservations.
We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
BOP CUTTING 5,000+ EMPLOYEES; PLANS TRANSFER OF SOME LOW-SECURITY INMATES TO PRIVATE PRISONS
Amid plans announced last summer to chop 12% of its workforce, the Bureau of Prisons has issued a memorandum to all wardens (which the BOP calls “Chief Executive Officers”) last week in which it announced that “to alleviate the overcrowding at Bureau of Prisons’ (BOP) institutions and to maximize the effectiveness of the private contracts,” low-security institutions should submit names eligible inmates to be transferred to private prisons.
The memo, leaked to Government Executive magazine (undoubtedly by a happy BOP employee), set the following designation criteria. The inmates should
• be classified as low security status, • be male and non-U.S. citizens, • be assigned a medical and mental health care level 1 or 2, and • have 90 months or less remaining to serve on their sentence.
Specific to Rivers Correctional Institution, a private prison run by The GEO Group (located in Winton, NC, 100 miles east northeast of Raleigh, NC), the Bureau specifies that inmate should be a
• male inmate classified as Low security with IN custody, • sentenced out of the District of Columbia Superior or District Court, and • assigned a medical and mental health care level 1 or 2.
Rivers CI will accept inmates who meet the who are awaiting enrollment in the residential drug abuse program (RDAP).
Mother Jones, a leftist magazine, reported today that this expanded use of private prisons comes as the agency plans to cut the number of correctional officers and other employees at its own institutions. The magazine said, “In a conference call days before the memo leaked, the bureau told facility administrators to expect a 12 to 14 percent reduction in staffing levels—though lawmakers and others have argued that prisons are already dangerously understaffed.”
The Administration’s FY 2019 budget calls for cutting 6,000 BOP positions, including more than 1,800 correctional officers. Eric Young, president of the American Federation of Government Employees council representing BOP employees, said, “It has sent a panic throughout my ranks.” Employees are worried that if natural attrition and vacancy elimination alone do not reach the BOP’s staff reduction goals, mandatory layoffs could follow. Not hiring to fill vacancies will worsen existing staffing shortfalls, Young said.
While last week’s BOP memo targets immigrants serving time, private prison executives have previously suggested that other inmates may soon be transferred as well. “You’ll see the bureau evaluate U.S. citizens as they have previously evaluated criminal aliens,” J. Dave Donahue, president of GEO Group’s US corrections operations, told investors on a call last August.
We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
INCH DOESN’T GIVE AN INCH IN CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY ON RRC CHANGES
The House Committee on Oversight and Government invited BOP Director Mark Inch, Dept. of Justice Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, and several correctional advocates to a hearing last week, where BOP use of residential reentry centers – halfway houses and home confinement – was front and center.
Despite a lot of pushback from the legislators on the Committee, Director Inch did not describe the wholesale withdrawal of halfway house and home confinement time that many inmates have reported, and kept suggesting that all of the halfway house reporting in the media has really just centered on the BOP’s cut of 16 halfway houses, which represented only about 1% of RRC beds. The Director said those 16 were underutilized and were duplicated by nearby facilities. He mentioned almost as an afterthought that, oh yeah, the BOP has also been busy implementing the DOJ IG’s recommendation that it do a “better job of managing our contracts with those RRCs.”
The Director did his best to talk around repeated questions about recent BOP cuts to halfway house and home confinement time, and met every question from legislators with a repetition that the cuts to the 16 halfway house contracts did not “signal any lessening of our belief in the importance of the program. And I am committed to running the program very efficiently and to the capacity necessary for the population.”
[A] census of federal prisons has shown that BOP is sending fewer offenders to RRCs for these kinds of step-down services that reduce recidivism; instead these offenders are remaining longer in federal prison or being released directly into the community without support. Furthermore, BOP is no longer accepting US Probation Office residents in BOP-contracted RRCs, which will also negatively impact recidivism. Recent budget cuts were cited by the BOP as the primary reason for these changes.
At the Oversight hearing last awednesday, written testimony and nearly three hours of questioning shed light on what is happening with the BOP’s management of its RRC relationships.
Not the kind of “halfway house” we’re talking about.
First, it turns out that the Inspector General has criticized the BOP for sending “the great majority of eligible inmates into RRCs regardless of whether they needed transitional services, unless the inmate was deemed not suitable for such placement because the inmate posed a significant threat to the community. As a result, high-risk inmates with a high need for transitional services were less likely to be placed in an RRC or home confinement, and were correspondingly more likely to be released back into society directly from BOP institutions without transitional programming. Moreover, low-risk, low-need inmates were being placed in RRCs even though BOP guidance, as well as the research cited in the guidance, indicates that low-risk inmates do not benefit from and may in fact be harmed by RRC placement because of, among other things, their exposure to high-risk offenders in those facilities.”
Second, the BOP has been badly overpaying the halfway houses for home confinement services. It pays halfway houses an average of $70.79 for inmates placed there, but up until recently, it had blindly been paying half that – $35.39 a day – for inmates the halfway houses sent to home confinement. The Government Accounting Office has reported that the $35.39 daily payment had nothing to do with the actual cost of home confinement, which is more in the range of $8.00 a day. As a result, the BOP has now demanded halfway house contractors file separate bids for home confinement services, which should drive down costs to about what home confinement actually costs.
Third, Director Inch admitted that the BOP had been “overfilling” halfway houses well beyond the number of beds committed, and said that the new “normal” for the BOP will 4 months of halfway house only for those who really need it. This way, Inch said, three inmates could use a halfway house bed every year, each one for four months. This suggests that low-security and campers, who usually need a lot less reentry services, may remain where they are right up to the out date.
Fourth, the BOP changed its Statement of Work, the description of the resources a halfway house is expected to deliver (and which will be paid for by BOP), to eliminate delivery of cognitive behavioral programming (a requirement under the Obama administration) and associated staff training. The ICCA – whose members admittedly have a financial stake in receipt of the maximum amount of the $100 million plus the BOP spends annually on RRCs – said, “This is a significant change that means individuals coming out of federal prison will no longer receive the evidence-based programming that is proven to change criminal thinking and significantly lower recidivism.”
At the same time, the new SOW eliminates the RRC social services coordinator, who, according to the ICCA, has served as a liaison to community resources, has ensured continuity of care, has supported reentry transitional needs, and has coordinated social services including employment assistance and life skills programming. “They took away the person that was going to welcome them home, basically,” said former ICCA president Anne Connell-Freund. “It’s not exactly known how many halfway houses and how many beds have been affected.”
Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Maryland) was concerned about the BOP’s “serious cuts” to the Baltimore halfway house that he said have put the facility on shaky financial ground. Director Inch may be a newbie at the BOP, but his experience as a general in the Army has honed his political instincts well. His affable non-answer to Rep. Cummings was to offer to stop by the Congrassman’s office for a one-on-one about Baltimore. But for now, he bloviated, “Is it our intent to cut back on the program: absolutely not.”
Rep. Matthew Cartwright (D-Pennsylvania) bluntly took the Director to task for current BOP plans to drop staff levels at prisons to 88% of “mission critical” levels. The Director suggested that the BOP will be adjusting its “mission critical” levels downward, which is a neat bureaucratic response to a serious problem. We don’t meet the standards? Then, by golly, let’s change the standards.
Rep. Cartwright pointed out that the BOP had gotten 99% of the appropriations it asked for wages and salaries, wondering why such cuts were needed in light of continued funding. The Director – who pled indulgence for being new on the job throughout the hearing – said he did not know why, despite the appropriation, the staffing cuts were so deep.
International Community Corrections Association, Bureau of Prisons Residential Reentry Centers: Reduction in bed use and programming will increase recidivism
The Times said correctional officer vacancies has ballooned to over 2,100 (about 12% of the CO workforce). As a result, the paper said, “the practice of drawing upon other workers has become routine — many prisons have been operating in a perpetual state of staffing turmoil, leaving some workers feeling ill-equipped and unsafe on the job.”
Meanwhile, The Gothamist (a magazine published by public radio station WNYC) last week savaged conditions at MCC New York. The article described “a rat-infested, high-rise hell just yards from the federal courts… That could be exactly the way jailers and prosecutors want it. Pre-trial detention, which often lasts years, can become not only unsafe, but coercive; as a result, individuals are pressured to provide information to prosecutors or accept plea deals in their desperation to be released, say former prisoners.” 
