Tag Archives: BOP

Sizzling Hot, Drugs and Sex at the BOP – Update for August 19, 2025

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

Summer is ending with back-to-school, football, and cooler days upon us. In commemoration of a short summer, I am condensing a surprising amount of news from last week into ‘shorts’.

BOP ‘SHORTS’

Hot Fun in the Summertime:  Forty House Democrats signed a letter from Rep Alma Adams (D-NC) last week to Bureau of Prisons Director William K. Marshall III expressing concern over the effects of extreme heat on BOP prisoners.

The letter asked 13 detailed questions about air conditioning in BOP facilities, including about prisons without AC or with broken systems, how many heat-related health incidents (illnesses, strokes, and deaths) have occurred since 2022, and any mitigation strategies used where prisoners and staff are in excessive heat.

The letter seeks a response by September 10, 2025.

Letter to William K. Marshall III (August 11, 2025)

BOP Unions Continue ‘Drug Poisoning’ Drumbeat:  It’s been a year since BOP employee Marc Fischer died after coming in contact with purported legal mail to a USP Atwater inmate that was soaked in a liquid “spice” mixture.  The death sparked a flurry of hand-wringing over BOP employees in danger that was not even quelled by autopsy results showing Mr. Fischer died of a heart attack, not exposure to any drugs.

The facts have not detained BOP staff unions, who last week issued a press release asking, “Does another staff member have to die before the Federal Bureau of Prisons finally takes the crisis of drugs entering prisons through the mail seriously? It’s now been a year since Marc Fischer—a longtime mailroom supervisor at U.S. Penitentiary Atwater and former Coast Guard member—lost his life after being exposed to contaminated mail, just before his planned retirement. Since then, nothing has changed. Dangerous substances continue to pour into federal prisons weekly, and staff are left to fight this epidemic with outdated technology and little support from the Bureau.”

The press release asserted that in recent incidents, “17 officers at Thomson were hospitalized after exposure to dangerous substances in the mailroom and required Narcan to survive. Days earlier, ten staff members at FCC Victorville suffered exposures over a four-day stretch.”

The BOP was a bit more circumspect: “We can confirm that several employees at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Thomson have begun feeling unwell following a possible exposure to an unknown substance. Some employees were transported to a local hospital by emergency medical services (EMS).”

In a separate report, WDTV reported that 5 FCI Hazelton employees were taken to the hospital last Wednesday morning, according to the BOP, after being exposed to drugs. The report said, “Any time fentanyl or carfentanil is found, the officers are being sent to the hospital as a precaution…”

WTTV, Federal Prison Staff Still at Risk as Drugs Continue Flooding Through the Mail (August 13, 2025)

WDTV, Multiple FCI Hazelton employees exposed to carfentanil for 4th time this week (August 11, 2025)

Dublin Scandal Nets More Guilty Pleas:  Former BOP correctional officers Jeffrey Wilson and Lawrence Gacad have pled to sexually abusing female inmates at FCI Dublin, formerly a low-security female prison.

Wilson and Gacad were charged last June and entered pleas on August 4. They are the eighth and ninth BOP staffers to have either pled guilty or been convicted involving sexual abuse of Dublin inmates.  The BOP has already agreed to a $116 million payout to abused women.

Dept of Justice, Two More FCI Dublin Correctional Officers Plead Guilty To Sexually Abusing Female Inmates (August 7, 2025)

~ Thomas L. Root

Will First Step Task Force Make A Difference? – Update for August 1, 2025

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

FIRST STEP TASK FORCE FINDING ITS FOOTING

Rick Stover, Senior Deputy Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Designation and Sentence Computation Center (DSCC), says that the BOP’s new First Step Act task force has begun evaluating prisoners now in halfway houses who could be transferred to home confinement if they were to receive the full benefit of “stacking” recommended Second Chance Act placement atop FSA time credits.

Writing in Forbes, Walter Pavlo said the task force – with over 30 DSCC analysts assigned – noted that while the SCA limits home confinement to the final 6 months (or 10%) of a sentence, “the end of the sentence is a moving target for some inmates because they continue to earn FSA credits each month even when they are at the halfway house. The Task Force is manually calculating these dates for inmates in halfway houses, because the BOP’s own computer program currently does not calculate these dates once inmates are released [to] halfway houses.” Mr. Stover said the task force is ensuring that such calculations will occur with the recent application updates.

Once that is done, Mr. Stover told Mr. Pavlo, the Task Force will focus on those currently in prison. Mr. Stover said, “As we… move inmates from the halfway houses to home confinement, we expect this to create a sizable number of open beds in many of our halfway houses across the country. This allows us to then revisit the placement dates for inmates currently in our institutions and increase the number of inmates that we can place in the community, and in many instances, allow inmates to get out of prison quicker to begin their transition to go home.”

Mr. Stover is optimistic, Mr. Pavlo reports. “While the Bureau has made marked improvements in our time credit calculation applications since the onset of the FSA statute, more improvements are needed. We have changes forthcoming that will simplify the data for both staff and inmates.”

The BOP effort to push prisoners out to halfway house and home confinement as early as possible is laudable, especially because some prison consultants think that the BOP has discretion to deny inmates their entitlement to FSA credits. I reported a month ago on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia’s dismissal of Crowe v. BOP. Former BOP Unit Management Section Chief Susan Giddings (now a private prison consultant), writing for herself and prison consultant Bruce Cameron last week, lauded the dismissal. She said that the Crowe court’s denial of class status

was particularly gratifying for the authors because they have consistently argued that 1) there is nothing in the FSA that eliminated or modified the Bureau’s designation authority, including halfway house and home confinement designations, and 2) the idea that the FSA required the Bureau to transfer an individual solely based their eligibility date regardless of any other compelling issues undermined the requirements of the Second Chance Act (SCA). The SCA required the Bureau to ensure that incarcerated individuals were provided with the same individualized consideration when making prerelease designation decisions as they were when making institution designation decisions. The decision-making process for prerelease placement (i.e., halfway house and home confinement) includes the inmate’s unit team making a prerelease placement recommendation based on a variety of factors, including but not limited to individual release needs, institutional conduct, the current offense, history of success or failure in prior community placement, and criminal history. The completed designation request is then sent to residential reentry staff, who then consider all the information provided by the institution, as well as the community program resources and any community safety issues when making the designation decision.

I disagree with Dr. Giddings and Mr. Cameron that Crowe went as far as they argues it does and that the decision is a good thing. Walt Pavlo may agree with me. He implicitly suggests that keeping inmates in BOP prisons when they are legally eligible for less restrictive incarceration may be due to a BOP mindset as much as anything. Earlier this week, Mr. Pavlo described the problem as being that

the BOP has lacked leadership to lead it into the modern era of incarceration. It is an Agency that prospered during the days of locking up drug offenders that saw the federal prison population top over 220,000 in 2013. Then as buildings became old and decrepit, it failed to keep up and now BOP employees sit in the same rotting, molded facilities that house the inmates they watch.

Dr. Giddings and Mr. Cameron seem confident that BOP decisionmakers will do the right thing by the inmates they oversee, and that they both need and will responsibly use the authority to withhold FSA placement based on SCA factors that they argue that the law provides. Their view is shared by a number of commentators and many US Attorneys’ offices, and is worth noting.

At the same time, Mr. Pavlo’s blunt suggestion that Bureau employees are locked in old thinking is a notion shared by its own cohort of observers.  New BOP Director Marshall so far has made some promising moves, including the Task Force. Now, the Task Force has to perform.

Forbes, Bureau of Prisons Task Force Taking Shape, Challenges Remain (July  23, 2025)

Giddings, Crowe, et al. v Federal Bureau of Prisons, et al: Common Sense for the Win! (July 25, 2025)

LISA, Class Action FSA Credit Lawsuit Against the BOP Case Dismissed (June 16, 2025)

Forbes, Bureau Of Prisons Could Fix First Step Act, If It Had The Will (July 29, 2025)

~ Thomas L. Root

And Now a Word From Our Sponsor – Update for July 28, 2025

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

NEWSLETTERS HANGING BY A THREAD

I’ve been writing the LISA Newsletter for nine years and seven months now. Whether I will make it to 10 years is anyone’s guess.

Back in the day, the Federal Bureau of Prisons provided inmates with the weekly BNA Criminal Law Reporter, first in print in the facility law libraries and later on inmate computers. Bloomberg acquired BNA in 2011, and the CLR ceased publication seven years later. As I recall (and my memory may be faulty, as my wife will attest), the BOP dropped CLR in about 2015 or 2016 when Bloomberg jacked up the subscription fee).

Any number of legal newsletters from law firms, paralegal services, and advocacy organizations have popped up in the last decade, chiefly because inmate email made distribution inexpensive and quick. LISA’s was one of them. None of us had the staff and resources of Bloomberg BNA, but then no one was charging for the service, either. The newsletters filled a void.

I sent the first LISA weekly newsletter out on November 29, 2015, to 13 subscribers. That was about 502 newsletters ago. My subscriber count went up quickly, leveling off somewhere beyond 10,000 prisoners and another 500 people outside of prison.

The BOP Corrlinks system helped a lot. It was clunky, the kind of thing you would expect to find on a Commodore 64 running Windows 3.1 (circa 1992), but it allowed the formation of groups of up to 1,000 people per group.

Until the end of last September, I could distribute 12,000 newsletters on Sunday night in about 15 minutes, sending to 12 groups of 1,000 subscribers each. But then progress…

At that time, the BOP dramatically changed its Corrlinks program to only permit 10 prisoners in each group. The only way to send the newsletter was with an outside service that could dedicate computers to the task, automatically logging on and sending to group after group after group. Even with 2024 computing power, we could only send about 2,000 newsletters a day, and some were missed as the Corrlinks system would lock out accounts for hours if it detected that too many emails had been sent in a given period.

It was messy but survivable.

Then, two weeks ago, the BOP changed the Corrlinks system again. Now, no email may be sent to more than one inmate recipient at a time. This means that we would have to send over 10,000 emails each week in order to deliver the newsletter to everyone who wants it. Our delivery people at Contxts (gocontxt.com) – a great group who had been providing computer delivery services to LISA and other legal newsletters without charge while they perfected their inmate messaging system – had been delivering about 2,000 newsletters a day until last week. Under the new system, we were lucky to get more than 400 a day sent out without being locked, and even that effort required substantial computer resources.

Last Thursday night, Contxts reluctantly informed us that newsletter delivery was soaking up a lot of resources for a frustratingly small throughput of newsletters. return. The company could no longer provide the newsletter distribution service.

For now, I will continue to write the newsletter. I post it online every Sunday night and email it to about 500 people outside of the BOP system. If you want your people to forward you the email, have them send a request to newsletter@lisa-legalinfo.com or cut and paste right from the LISA website at www.lisa-legalinfo.com.

We are working on finding a way to deliver the newsletter again. Printing and mailing the newsletter costs well over $1.50 per mailing, and that does not include the cost of labor. Email delivery is essential to the future of the newsletter.

~ Thomas L. Root

A Short Rocket of BOP News – Update for July 24, 2025

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

LAST WEEK AT THE BUREAU OF PRISONS

You’d think that the sole focus of the Federal Bureau of Prisons in the last week had been how to produce celebrity prisoner Ghislaine Maxwell for a Congressional deposition. But from Duluth to Alcatraz, there was a lot else going on as well. Here’s the short rocket…

Marshall Establishes FSA Task Force:   Bureau of Prisons Director William K. Marshall III announced the established of an FSA Task Force at the BOP’s Grand Prairie, Texas, Designation and Sentence Computation Center.

Marshall cited inmate “frustration that their paperwork for home confinement under the First Step Act (FSA) wasn’t being processed by staff despite Director Marshall’s directive to maximize the use of community placement. But at the same time, the staff told [Marshall] that the systems they rely on weren’t always showing the right dates… The majority of staff were doing their best with the information they had, but, unfortunately, they were taking the blame from inmates and families who thought they were dragging their feet. That wasn’t fair to them.”

The task force will identify prisoners in halfway houses who are eligible for home confinement; manually calculate home confinement dates that “stack[] both the FSA and Second Chance Act;” and ‘[r]eview eligible incarcerated individuals inside institutions for additional community placement opportunities.”

Writing in Forbes, Walter Pavlo said, “Having a person serve a portion of their sentence in the community is not something new and has been used for decades by the BOP. However, the Agency has been slow to move inmates after the [First Step Act] was codified… in January 2022. The initiative is part of Director Marshall’s broader strategy of “Leadership in Action,” which has included institutional walk-throughs, direct engagement with frontline staff, and timely operational changes based on what he hears.”

BOP, Director Marshall Launches FSA Task Force (July 14, 2025)

Forbes, Bureau of Prisons Launches First Step Act Task Force (July 14, 2025)

Alcatraz Moves Forward:  Never mind that the price tag has blown through $2 billion to renovate a prison closed for 60 years that only houses 325 prisoners and has no water supply. A visit to Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay last week by Attorney General Bondi, Dept of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Marshall, and BOP Deputy Director Joshua J. Smith makes it clear that President Trump’s May musings on social media that he wanted to reopen Alcatraz as a federal prison to “house America’s most ruthless and violent offenders” and remove criminals “who came into our country illegally,” is going to happen.

A BOP press release underscores that reopening Alcatraz is pure symbolism, the fevered dream of President Trump: “Reopening Alcatraz isn’t just about a building, it’s about sending a message: crime doesn’t pay, and justice will be served. If feasible, Alcatraz will stand as a beacon of American resolve, where the most dangerous offenders face accountability. For the public, it’s a promise fulfilled—a stronger, safer America. And for President Trump, it’s a project that will make our nation proud.”

Alcatraz was closed as a maximum-security prison in 1963 after 29 years of operation, because it was too expensive to continue operating. Now managed by the National Park Service, the island is one of San Francisco’s most popular tourist destinations.

BOP, The Rebirth of Alcatraz (July 17, 2025)

NY Times, Trump’s Plan to Reopen Alcatraz Appears to Move Forward With Officials’ Visit (Jul 17)

FPC Duluth to Remain Open: Seven months after the then-BOP Director Colette Peters listed FPC Duluth with six other facilities that would be closed because of “aging and dilapidated infrastructure,” new BOP boss William K. Marshall III announced last week after a site inspection that the minimum-security camp “will not be deactivated.”

Currently, there are only about 258 inmates remaining at the facility, but officials anticipate repopulating the camp to its rated capacity of about 800 prisoners. The camp is located on the grounds of the former Duluth Air Force Base.

Minnesota Public Radio, Duluth prison camp to remain open, reversing earlier decision to ‘deactivate’ the facility (July 16, 2025)

ICE Sending Immigrant Detainees to FDC Honolulu, Proposes Using Fort Dix: Under normal circumstances, scoring an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii would be a Wheel of Fortune moment.  But these are not normal circumstances.

It turns out that over 70 immigrant detainees, some from as far east as Florida, are being flown to imprisonment at the Federal Detention Center in Honolulu.

The Honolulu Civil Beat quoted one immigration lawyer as saying that a client “was taken into custody in Florida and went to two detention centers there before he was transferred to Louisiana, Arizona and two facilities in California before finally coming to Hawaiʻi.” Attorneys are complaining that the endless moves and distances make consultation with their clients almost impossible.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Homan said over the weekend that 60,000 immigrants are currently in custody, with plans for 40,000 more.

Still, air conditioning in the Aloha State may be better than a tent in the South Jersey heat. Last week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth approved the use of Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, where FCI Fort Dix is located, to confine immigrants. The Defense Department said detainees would be confined in “temporary soft-sided holding facilities,” suggesting for now that facilities at the aging FCI Fort Dix – located on base grounds – will not be used.

Honolulu Civil Beat, ICE Is Moving Immigrants Arrested On The Mainland To Honolulu (July 16, 2025)

Philadelphia Inquirer, Trump administration plans to hold immigration detainees on South Jersey military base (July 18, 2025)

~ Thomas L. Root

FCI Dublin Is A Neverending Shop of Horrors – Update for July 18, 2025

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SAME OL’ SAME OL’, DUBLIN SPECIAL MASTER TELLS COURT

The female prisoners who were subject to sexual abuse at FCI Dublin and whose treatment by the BOP is still be monitored by US District Court for the eastern District of California are still complaining of being sexually assaulted, retaliated against and not getting medical care at more than a dozen federal facilities across the country, according to a report filed by Wendy Still, appointed special master by the court to monitor BOP compliance with the lawsuit’s settlement agreement.

Still, the former chief Alameda County probation department officer, is monitoring the former Dublin inmates with a team that includes a doctor, nurse and a prison rape expert.

“The report found significant deficiencies and affirms much of what survivors of BOP already know,” Kara Janssen, an attorney at Rosen, Bien, Galvan and Grunfeld, told KTVU-TV. “That the problems that came to light at FCI Dublin were symptoms of larger, systemic problems throughout BOP.”

The report, the first monthly report to be issued (covering April 2025), chronicled continued sex abuse, lack of medical care, and retaliation being experienced by former Dublin alums spread throughout the BOP system that began even as they were moved from Dublin in an evacuation under the nose of the District Court that made Saigon in April 1975 look orderly.

Still’s authority to assess BOP care came as part of a 2023 class action lawsuit and subsequent consent decree filed on behalf of about 600 incarcerated women at FCI Dublin, where 10 correctional officers have now been charged with sex crimes; seven of them so far have been found guilty, convicted and sentenced to prison themselves.

There are 305 women in the lawsuit class who are still incarcerated in 15 BOP prisons across the country.

The report’s findings include, for example:

Unprofessional and retaliatory behavior has also been reported on the part of medical providers, nurses, and emergency medical technicians. Providers have been reported to tell Class Members they should feel lucky they are getting care since they are illegal aliens or criminals. Shockingly, it is alleged that providers have also told Class Members that they should not expect special care because they are from “Dublin” and that no amount of “whining to lawyers” will get them care more expeditiously. Lastly, it is not clear that front line providers have retained professional independence and as a result, there appear to be instances when facility protocols or directive outweigh clinical professional judgement.

Meanwhile, the hits surrounding the FCI Dublin “rape club” just keep on coming. On June 26, former BOP employees Jeffrey Wilson and Lawrence Gacad became the ninth and tenth FCI Dublin employees to be charged, charged in the sexual abuse scandel that led to Dublin’s closure in 2024.

KTVU, Sex assault, retaliation complaints still persist across U.S. prisons, special master finds in 1st report (July 2, 2025)

Public Monthly Status Report For Rating Period March 31, 2025 – April 30, 2025, California Coalition for Women Prisoners v FBOP Consent Decree, Case No 4:23-cv-04155  (ND Cal, released June 30, 2025)

Thomas L. Root

BOP’s ‘Big, Beautiful’ Budget – Update for July 17, 2025

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MONEY, THAT’S WHAT I WANT

Slate magazine published a piece a week ago complaining that “the Trump administration has thrown the lives of incarcerated people into chaos—especially the more than 150,000 people under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.”

Slate admitted that the BOP’s crisis has been “long-standing,” with issues ranging from crumbling infrastructure to sexual assault to severe staffing shortages. However, Slate argued, “incarcerated people and BOP experts say that in just a few short months, the Trump administration has exacerbated this crisis. He has implemented major pay cuts, issued confusing and short-sighted orders, directly targeted vulnerable incarcerated populations, and haphazardly slashed funding for crucial initiatives.”

The Slate article hit the streets only a day after Trump signed the Big Beautiful Bill Act (HR 1)  which passed Congress by the thinnest of margins. But it turns out that the bill may undercut any of the damage that Slate has laid at the President’s feet.

Last week, BOP Director William K. Marshall III issued a video message to staff in which he noted that HR1 “provides $3 billion in staffing support over several years… for hiring of new staff and the salary and benefits for current employees “as well as “”funding for training which will address a critical need of our employees.” The $3 billion will be spread over five years “which equates to approximately $600 million a year through Sep 30, 2029.”

The BBB also provides $2 billion “for the maintenance and repairs” of BOP facilities, which carry a price tag of almost $3 billion but a maintenance budget – before BBB – of about $150 million. Marshall said the $2 billion will be used to “tackle major repair projects that prioritize those that involve life safety security and operational agency. It is a major step forward in reducing the maintenance backlog and enhancing our facilities to meet the standards we expect in our own homes…”

The BBB’s $5 billion is a one-shot funding that will expire September 30, 2029. However, money to meaningfully address crumbling infrastructure and full staffing – which should lead to ending the frequent lockdowns and augmentation that disrupts programming – may benefit prisoners as much as it does staff.

Slate, A Surprise Target of Trump’s Cutbacks Is Devastating One Specific Population (July 5, 2025)

BOP, Director’s Message (July 11, 2025)

HR1, The Big Beautiful Bill Act (July 4, 2025)

Thomas L. Root

Horowitz Leaves DOJ Inspector General Post – Update for July 11, 2025

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

BOP INMATES LOSE A CHAMPION

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, one of the only federal government inspectors general to survive President Trump’s January purge, has left his position to become IG of the Federal Reserve.

Bloomberg Law reports that Horowitz’s departure “has former officials and lawyers worried that an era of robust, independent oversight of law enforcement is ending at the worst possible moment.”

Horowitz’s successor will face a growing pile of complaints seeking probes into top DOJ officials and White House efforts to shrink the IG’s budget by 28%. As the DOJ’s largest agency by employees and the second largest by budget (next to the US Attorneys’ offices), the BOP has drawn substantial oversight from Horowitz. Well before the Federal Prison Oversight Act passed, mandating regular inspections of BOP facilities, Horowitz began sending teams to prisons for surprise audits. The IG’s office added detail and official gravitas to many of the complaints that inmates have lodged for years.

Some in the IG and whistleblower communities told Bloomberg Law that they hope Horowitz’s veteran deputy,  William M. Blier, takes over the iG office and maintains “the office’s reputation for bipartisan accountability.” Blier is running things for the time being, but some fear that a new appointee will be a puppet.

“Mr. Horowitz personified a public servant who followed the evidence wherever it led, regardless of political party,” said Tom Devine, legal director at the Government Accountability Project, which represents whistleblowers cooperating with the IG’s office. “He will be sorely missed because he will be the last credible official source of factfinding at the Department of Justice.”

Bloomberg Law, Veteran DOJ Watchdog’s Exit Spurs Fears of Lax Trump Oversight (June 27, 2025)

– Thomas L. Root

Inspector General Blasts BOP Use of Restraints – Update for July 8, 2025

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RESTRAINTS KILL, MAIM INMATES THROUGH IMPROPER USE, IG SAYS

The Dept of Justice Office of Inspector General reported in a memorandum last week that BOP policies governing the use of physical restraints on inmates are inadequate.

BOP policy allows the use of restraints to gain control of disruptive inmates, ranging from ambulatory restraints that allow limited freedom of movement to four-point restraints and waist chains that render prisoners immobile from the neck down. Policy dictates that restraints are to be used only as a last resort and never as a method of punishment.

A 2022 Marshall Project/NPR investigation uncovered restraint abuses at USP Thomson. “Specifically,” the report said, “many men reported being shackled in cuffs so tight they left scars, or being ‘four-pointed’ and chained by each limb to a bed for hours, far beyond what happens at other prisons and in violation of bureau policy and federal regulations.” A subsequent  Marshall Project/NPR investigation last December reported on dozens of similar restraint abuse allegations of prolonged shackling and abuse at USP Lee.

The IG said it had received “numerous allegations every year regarding abuse, mistreatment, or injury of inmates in connection with the use of restraints, including four-point restraints.”  Between August 2022 and August 2023, complaints about four-point restraints alone numbered in the “dozens.”

Multiple complaints alleged inmates “suffered nerve damage or other long-term injuries due to the prolonged use of restraints. For example, one inmate suffered long-term scarring and was provisionally diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome due to ongoing complaints of wrist numbness after being held in four-point restraints for over 3 days…” The IG said, “[A]nother inmate suffered severe injury requiring the amputation of part of the inmate’s limb after being held in a combination of ambulatory restraints and a restraint chair for over 2 days.”

“The inmate’s injury worsened to the point of needing hospitalization and amputation despite medical checks occurring at time intervals that complied with policy,” the memo stated. “The medical checks were completed by different medical staff who did not discuss the progression of the inmate’s injuries between shifts, and there were no photographs or video recordings to document that a medical check was actually performed and to show the progression of the inmate’s injuries.”

In another case, the IG said, a prisoner was “placed in a restraint chair with restraints on both wrists and both ankles for more than 2 days and then, less than 2 hours after being released from restraints, sprayed by BOP staff with pepper spray following an alleged altercation with a cellmate and placed back in the restraint chair for another approximately 5 hours until being discovered unresponsive.” The autopsy listed the cause of death as “Vaso-Occlusive Crisis due to Sickle Cell Disease Complicating Oleoresin Capsicum Use and Prolonged Restraint Following Altercation.”

The memo recommended improving guidelines and training on the use of restraints, strengthening reporting requirements, and requiring audio and video recording of health checks of inmates in restraints.

DOJ Inspector General, Notification of Concerns Regarding the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Policies Pertaining to the Use of Restraints on Inmates (June 30, 2025)

The Marshall Project and NPR, How the Newest Federal Prison Became One of the Deadliest (May 31, 2022)

 

Thomas L. Root

Less than Meets the Eye – Update for June 30, 2025

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A TRULY SHORT STACK

A week ago, I reported that BOP Director William K. Marshall III had announced the dawning of a new day in the use of First Step Act credits (FTCs) and the Second Chance Act. Among his several promises was that his new policy “ensures that FSA Earned Time Credits and SCA eligibility will be treated as cumulative and stackable, allowing qualified individuals to serve meaningful portions of their sentences in home confinement when appropriate.”

It turns out that the new memo doesn’t exactly say “cumulative and stackable”. Instead, it directs that “[i]n addition to FTCs for those individuals who have earned less than 365 days of FTCs, staff must also consider adding up to an additional 12 months of prerelease time under the SCA, based on the five-factor review.”

Under the heading “The Rules Are Clear,” a number of institutions last week issued guidance that doubled down on the memo. The “guidance” stated, “For individuals who have earned less than 365 days of FSA time credits towards supervised release, staff must also consider adding up to an additional 12 months of pre-release time under the SCA based on the five-factor review. The FSA Time Credit Worksheet for time under the SCA defaults to and will remain “zero” until your Unit Team inputs the pre-release time as determined based on the five-factor review. The number will range from zero to 12 months.”

Notwithstanding the heading, the only thing “clear” in all of this is the implication that, despite what the Director said, people who have more than 365 FTCs to be used toward prerelease custody will probably not be getting any SCA time whatsoever.

Practically speaking, no one with a sentence of under 46 months will earn any FTCs that go to prerelease custody. That’s because it is only mathematically possible to earn 365 days in a sentence of that length, after being adjusted for good time granted under 18 USC § 3624(b). All of the 46-monthers’ FTCs will be used up in cutting their sentences by 12 months. It will take a sentence of at least 74 months before a prisoner has accumulated more than 365 additional FTCs to be used toward more halfway house or home confinement. So the people with the most time – more than 74 months – being the ones most likely to benefit from the stacking, who will feel the impact of the non-stacking “stacking.”

Much of the problem arises from the tension between First Step and the SCA. Under the “five-factor review” (set out in 18 USC § 3621(b)), inmates are placed in halfway house not as a reward but rather because they need the prerelease custody time to give them “a reasonable opportunity to adjust to and prepare for the reentry.” 18 USC § 3624(c). First Step, on the other hand, treats halfway house/home confinement as a reward for earning FTCs. There’s nothing wrong with either approach, but the problem comes in mixing the two: despite all the fine talk about time being “cumulative and stackable,” the five-factor review applied to someone who is already entitled to 12 months in a halfway house as an incentive under the FSA is very unlikely to need any more than that amount of time there to have “a reasonable opportunity to adjust to and prepare for the reentry.”

The “five-factor review” will and probably should disqualify anyone with 12 months of prerelease custody under the FSA from any additional SCA prerelease time. If 12 months in a halfway house isn’t enough to prepare an inmate for release into the community, then (1) he or she probably is not rated as having a low chance of recidivism to begin with, and thus is ineligible to use any accumulated FTCs; and (2) will not make it in society once released.

I got email from an inmate last week denouncing the institutional guidance as “a very inmate-unfriendly interpretation of how FSA and SCA interact (despite the FSA saying time limits on SCA don’t apply and that FTCs should be in addition to other incentives).” But SCA halfway house was never meant to be an incentive, but rather was intended to be a tool for people who needed the transition time and services of a halfway house.

For now, the Director’s new policy suggests that we’ll see a lot more FSA prerelease time served on home confinement. That’s probably good for the BOP and prisoner alike. However, despite the “stackable and cumulative” talk, there is little reason to think that the “five-factor review” will result in stacked FSA and SCA prerelease custody time than it did before.

BOP, Bureau of Prisons Issues Directive to Fully Implement First Step Act and Second Chance Act (June 17, 2025)

BOP, Memorandum on Use of Home Confinement as a Release Option (June 17, 2025)

BOP, Home Confinement and Pre-Release Placement Updates (June 25, 2025)

– Thomas L. Root

Federal Judge Blocks New BOP Transgender Policy – Update for June 13, 2025

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

JUDGE BLOCKS BOP TRANSGENDER ORDER FOR NOW

The Supreme Court yesterday handed down three cases of interest to prisoners and their families, and a District of Columbia judge laid the leather to a class action against the Federal Bureau of Prison’s handling of FSA credits. All of that must wait until the weekend for me to digest and write about. For now, I have a decision to write about from last week, in which a federal judge ruled that the BOP cannot withhold gender-transition medical care from inmates identifying as transgender.

Under an Executive Order that President Trump signed on January 20th, the BOP was ordered to withhold any accommodations – from surgery and hormone therapy to access to gender-specific underwear and other commissary items – previously provided to inmates identifying as transgender.

In a 36-page-opinion, US District Judge Royce C. Lamberth (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia) granted a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the Executive Order and assigned class-action status to the lawsuit, brought on behalf of an estimated 1,028 BOP inmates who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a disorder caused by a mismatch between their assigned gender and their perceived gender. The preliminary injunction will remain in place while attorneys for the ACLU and the Transgender Law Center pursue a lawsuit challenging Trump’s executive order.

The Judge wrote that BOP rules adopted in response to the Executive Order seemed likely to be found to be “arbitrary and capricious” in violation of 5 USC § 702(6) and the 8th Amendment. The judge ordered the BOP to continue providing hormone therapy to transgender people as needed, and to restore access to social accommodations such as hair removal, chest binders and undergarments. “The BOP may not arbitrarily deprive inmates of medication or other lifestyle accommodations that its own medical staff have deemed to be medically appropriate,” he wrote.

The ACLU and the Transgender Law Center filed the suit on behalf of one trans woman and two trans men, but the judge made it a class action representing any person incarcerated in federal prison who now needs, or who may in the future need, access to gender-affirming care.

Memorandum Opinion (ECF 67), Kingdom v. Trump, Case No 1:25cv691 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 105237, (D.D.C., June 2, 2025)

Washington Post, U.S. judge halts Trump ban on treatment for 1,000 transgender prisoners (June 3, 2025)

– Thomas L. Root