We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
IG REPORT RAINS ON DIRECTOR’S PARADE
The tsunami of the Inspector General’s bad news (which I reported on Monday) threatened to wash away BOP Director Colette Peters’ rollout earlier last week of the agency’s “Framework for the Future,” an ambitious and obese plan “encompassing seven goals and over 180 unique initiatives… set to redefine the Bureau’s operations,” according to the BOP press release, which gushed:
The Executive Team, consisting of Regional Directors, Assistant Directors, and key figures from within the Director’s office, is personally overseeing these initiatives. Their unwavering commitment is geared towards propelling the agency forward, fostering a humane and secure environment, and preparing individuals for successful reentry into communities.
The BOP told employees in a video message last week that Peters had introduced the “Framework for the Future” and “engage[d] and empower[ed] the agency’s dedicated workforce with details about the seven goals.”
C’mon, Ms. Peters, please empower your dedicated PR flacks to spare us the bureaucratic happy talk BS, And while we’re at it, seven goals? One hundred eighty unique initiatives? Let’s keep it simple.
Writing in Forbes, Walter Pavlo said, “Peters was given a mandate by Congress to improve the BOP but many of those needed improvements have been problems for years. Office of Inspector General and Government Accountability Office have both authored scathing reports on the BOP. Peters, who appeared on 60 Minutes earlier this month, understands that the BOP cannot continue to operate inefficiently, and in some cases inhumanely, as it has for decades.”
Pavlo says many believe that Peters is “the agent of change needed to overhaul the BOP… which has been plagued by employee misconduct… increases in healthcare costs, understaffing, and infrastructure decay. The BOP has also had difficulty implementing the First Step Act… Delays in implementation have been caused by early misinterpretation of the law, computer glitches and a shortage of halfway house capacity.”
“The BOP has challenges and now Peters has outlined a plan to overcome them,” Pavlo says, but he warns that “it will not be easy.”
Peters has taken a deliberate approach to the problems, which are legion. During her first year as Director, Peters conducted “listening sessions,” including the novel but quite reasonable requirement for wardens of the BOP’s 122-odd facilities to listen to former prisoners, crime victims, subordinates in prison management and line workers, and advocates for change in the system. Writing in a Federal News Network story, Pavlo and attorney Alan Ellis predicted that “[i]t will take another year to judge the new direction Peters wants to take the agency, but expect her to double down on her message of a more humane federal prison system.”
Last summer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) proposed making the director of the Bureau of Prisons a Senate-confirmed position in S.2284, the Federal Prisons Accountability Act of 2023. The same measure has been filed in the House of Representatives as H.R.4138 by Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA), a member of the House BOP Reform Caucus.
Pavlo and Ellis observed that “Director Peters has enjoyed a long honeymoon with lawmakers, but they will be looking for results in 2024 — and so will many prisoners and BOP staff members.”
Bureau of Prisons, Reforming the Federal Bureau of Prisons (February 12. 2024)
Forbes, Bureau of Prisons Director Lays Out Goals For Improving Agency (February 13, 2024)
Federal News Network, The Bureau of Prisons and the challenges going into 2024 (February 21, 2024)
S.2284 – Federal Prisons Accountability Act of 2023
– Thomas L. Root