We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
STUFFING
Walter Pavlo reported in Forbes last weekend that the Bureau of Prison – despite being told by Congress in the First Step Act almost six years ago to expand halfway house capacity to accommodate prisoners using FSA credits, has increased contracted-for halfway house bed space by a paltry 1% in the last 6 years.
The BOP Office of Public Affairs reported that as of January 1, 2019, the BOP was contracting for 10,408 halfway house beds. As of two months ago, the BOP contracted for 10,553 halfway house beds. Pavlo wrote that “the BOP is now telling some halfway house providers… that they are canceling some solicitations for additional capacity because of ‘budgetary and staffing considerations.’”
Pavlo reported, “Many prisoners and their families are telling me that case managers are telling them that there is no room at halfway houses, and the result is that many minimum security prisoners spend a greater portion of their sentence in prison rather than in the community… BOP notes that ‘many of the unfilled beds in a halfway house are at locations that are hard to fill or are outside of the release residence area of individuals requesting community confinement placement’.”
So the Bureau argues to prisoners that the halfway houses are stuffed without room for people, who therefore lose the benefit of their FSA credits. Pavlo says that’s a myth. He and former BOP Director Hugh Hurwitz surveyed halfway houses and BOP usage of them, finding that only 82% of the BOP’s contracted halfway house capacity is being used. What’s more, the halfway houses have even more space open than that, space the halfway houses would like to fill but is not under BOP contract.
“BOP could look to modify those existing contracts to increase the number of beds available,” Pavlo wrote.
For now, it appears that the halfway house shortage has less to do with stuffed beds and more to do with BOP unwillingness to fill them.
We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
NBC REPORTS THAT HALFWAY HOUSE CAPACITY INTERFERES WITH FSA CREDITS
Not this kind of halfway house…
NBC News reported Saturday what will come as little surprise to many prisoners who are counting on FSA credits for the additional halfway house/home confinement promised by 18 USC 3624(g)(2): the First Step promise of reward for completing programming is illusory for many people granted more halfway house/home confinement time by the Bureau of Prisons but turned away from halfway houses for lack of space.
Sreedhar Potarazu, who successfully sued the BOP in 2022 over its repeated miscues in calculating FSA credits, alerted NBC to nine cases in which inmates were incarcerated between two and eight months past their “last date inside,” a term that he says denotes when an inmate can be transferred to prerelease custody because of FSA credits they had earned beyond the 365 days that the BOP is allowed to subtract from their sentence.
“Even one life kept in longer is an injustice,” Potarazu told NBC. “The taxpayer should care because they’re footing the bill. You may not have anyone in there, but you’re still paying for it.”
The BOP lists contracts with 145 halfway houses nationwide on its website, and an agency spokesperson told NBC that those halfway houses have more than 10,000 beds. The BOP said more than 8,200 prisoners are designated to halfway houses, but it is not clear how many are in home confinement but supervised by halfway houses.
The BOP is not much help in tracking the problem. The agency admitted to NBC that it keeps no records on how many inmates are losing the benefit of FSA credits already earned because halfway houses are refusing placement.
“Every effort is made to review and adjust available resources within the community so individuals may utilize” time credits, the BOP told NBC News, but that “some areas, specifically populated urban areas, are experiencing capacity concerns.”
The BOP insists that “credits are being calculated as required under the First Step Act.” But NBC said, “As the law has been implemented over the years, concerns have grown about whether time credits are being properly added up and applied as case managers log the information.”
Rep David Trone (D-MD), a member of the House Appropriations Committee, complained, “I always refer to the First Step Act as criminal justice lite,” Trone said. “We need to get real savings and give people real second chances. We haven’t executed the First Step Act properly.”
Writing in Forbes last week, Walter Pavlo argued that the BOP could bypass halfway house for a lot of prisoners and instead place them directly in home confinement. “Many inmates report that due to limitations in halfway house capacity that they are not able to utilize those credits for home confinement and they stay in prison… Overall, this issue of housing inmates in prison longer than necessary, and for which the BOP currently has the power to transfer to the community, affects tens of thousands of prisoners, many are minimum or low-security inmates. The BOP has the ability, but it is up to BOP Director Colette Peters to implement change that is within her power… something she has often spoken about.”
Ames Grawert, a senior counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice, acknowledges the capacity problem but argues that it’s up to Congress to ensure the BOP has the funding to implement the First Step Act and the infrastructure is in place. “Implementation is always a challenge in any law, especially when you’re dealing with a system that’s as complex and with so many issues as the Bureau of Prisons.”
Potarazu, an ophthalmic surgeon, spent at least four additional months in prison after his FSA eligibility date due to an admitted BOP error in calculating the credits. He filed a 28 USC § 2241 petition for habeas corpus in 2022 seeking proper calculation of his credits and designation to halfway house by July 31, 2022, the proper date for the transfer.
Potarazu’s case was finally ruled on last week, dismissed as “moot” because he was no longer in BOP custody. The Court ruled, “Petitioner’s requested relief—immediate placement in pre-release custody and/or supervised release—has already been achieved” because he was transferred to a halfway house on May 18, 2023” (10 months late) and released from custody on December 22, 2023, “Thus, Petitioner does not maintain any redressable claims and does not satisfy the collateral consequences exception.”
Potarazu told NBC he ultimately wants to see others released when the BOP is legally obligated to do so, and that prisoners shouldn’t have to assume they’re going to remain behind bars longer than they should and go to the lengths of litigation that can take years.
“Even when you have the foresight to do so, you’re still trapped,” he said.
We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
JUDICIARY COMMITTEE FIRST STEP ACT HEARING IGNORES HALFWAY HOUSE ELEPHANT
Senate Judiciary Committee leader Richard Durbin (D-IL) presided over a hearing last Wednesday commemorating the 5th anniversary of the First Step Act. The testimony was positive, upbeat, and largely useless.
“Five years ago, we wrote the blueprint for reimagining rehabilitation and protecting public safety, and now we know by the numbers that it works,” Durbin said to open the proceeding. “Today, I am looking forward to reflecting on what we can achieve… In order to make our system fairer, we must continue to learn from and [build upon] the proven successes of ‘smart on crime’ policies like the First Step Act. We must provide more opportunities for those who are incarcerated to reenter society successfully, reunite with their families, and contribute to their communities.”
Ja’Ron Smith, former Deputy Assistant for Domestic Policy under Trump, noted that the recidivism rate for First Step releasees is about 37% lower than what it was before the Act passed, used to be. Smith said, “For those released under the First Step Act, the rate is just 125. And technical violations – not new crimes – account for a third of that number.”
J. Charles Smith III, president of the National District Attorneys Assn, said First Step “did a great job of differentiating between good people making bad decisions and bad people making bad decisions. The bad people who make bad decisions stay in jail… The good people who made a bad decision, were convicted for it, [and] went to jail for it, are getting rehabilitated and released earlier as well, as they should.”
Steve Markle, an officer with the National Council Of Prison Locals, lauded the Act but said the Federal Bureau of Prisons 20% staffing shortfall (40% among correctional officers) “not only compromises safety by reducing the number of staff available to respond to emergencies but also hinders the provision of programming for the First Step Act. To fully realize the Act’spotential,” he said, “it is crucial to address the critical staffing crisis within the Bureau. The Council believes that the staffing crisis can only be resolved by addressing the pay band issue.”
Not this kind of halfway house…
It fell to Walter Pavlo, who was not a witness at Durbin’s lovefest, to explain a major glitch in First Step Act’s implementation of the evidence-based programming problem. Inmates are motivated to earn credits because those credits can buy up to a year off their sentences and – if any credits are left after the one-year credit -more halfway house or home confinement. But, writing in Forbes last week, Pavlo observed that inmates are being denied the right to spend those credits because “the BOP does not have room in halfway houses to monitor those who have rightfully earned First Step Act credits. The result, thousands of prisoners languish in expensive institutions rather than being placed in community halfway houses.”
Prisoners with many months of First Step halfway house/home confinement credit are being told by halfway houses that they cannot be accommodated. I know of one prisoner awarded his nine months of halfway house/home confinement credit only to be told that the halfway house could only give him a third of that. The Act states in 18 USC 3624(g)(11) that the BOP Director “shall ensure there is sufficient prerelease custody capacity to accommodate all eligible prisoners.” Pavlo writes, “This is a problem that is going to persist unless something is done.”
The BOP’s Residential Reentry Management Branch administrator said in a speech two weeks ago that halfway houses had a “90-day projection of 99% utilization,” meaning, Pavlo said, “that there was no room to place any more prisoners.”
The BOP knew five years ago that it would have to increase halfway house capacity, but doing so is a bureaucratic nightmare. Because the BOP has relied on halfway house staff to monitor home confinement inmates, the capacity crunch has affected home confinement placement as well. A decade ago, the BOP worked with the US Probation Office to get some prisoners monitored on Probation’s Federal Location Monitoring (FLM) to allow some home confinement prisoners to be monitored by Probation rather than halfway houses. But as of now, only 3.6% of home confinement prisoners are on FLM.
The BOP has an Interagency Agreement with Probation which Pavlo says presents “an opportunity to expand FLM in a manner that is both cost-effective and consistent with the evidence-based practices. However, each district court is responsible for participating, or not, in FLM. Getting every district court to coordinate with the BOP has been an issue for years, as the few prisoners in FLM clearly demonstrate.”
FLM costs far less than a halfway house per diem or halfway house-monitored home confinement. However, FLM is managed by each of the 94-odd federal judicial districts. Some participate with the BOP: others do not. Pavlo said a retired BOP executive told him, “I think the BOP would be receptive to expanding the program and it would resolve many of the issues related to capacity for prerelease custody, but the Courts are going to have to help.”
We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
FIVE YEARS SHOULD BE LONG ENOUGH TO GET FIRST STEP ACT RIGHT
The First Step Act, including its innovative system for granting credits to inmates who complete programs designed to reduce recidivism, is 5 years old in less than two months. But it took three years of fits and starts before the Bureau of Prisons pretty much had a final set of rules for administering FSA credits (after a proposal that was as miserly as the final rule was generous hanging around for a year of comments).
Now, almost two years later, the BOP is still muddled in trying to launch a computer program of forward-looking calculation for FSA credits that predicts when a prisoner will leave BOP custody for halfway house or home confinement (HH/HC). The agency still lacks a comprehensive list of what types of inmate employment or education constitutes “productive activities,” which are supposed to continue a prisoner’s earning of FSA credits. And the BOP continues to deny HH/HC placement because it lacks resources, despite First Step’s requirement that inmates be placed to the full extent of their FSA credits.
Writing in Forbes last week, Walter Pavlo observed that “prisoners, mostly minimum and low security, who are eligible for these credits have done their best to try to participate in programs but many complain of a lack of classes, mostly due to the challenges the BOP is having in hiring people. However, beyond that, the BOP has been liberal in accepting that the BOP does not have the staff to fulfill the demand for classes and credits are being given anyway, mostly for participating in productive activities, like jobs. This misses the primary mission of programming meant to have a lasting, positive influence on prisoners after they leave the institution.
“Now,” Pavlo said, “nearly two years since the Federal Register’s Final Rule in January 2022, the BOP still has no reliable calculator to determine the number of FSA credits a prisoner will earn during a prison term… One of the last remaining issues is for the BOP to have a forward-looking calculation for FSA credits that predicts when a prisoner will leave BOP custody. It sounds easy, but the BOP’s current computer program can only assess credits after they are earned each month, and it usually takes a full month after they are earned for them to post. The result is that each month, prisoners’ families look at BOP.gov to see if there are indeed new credits and if the amount they are expecting matches what is expected. This moving date is important because it can also determine when prisoners can leave prison for home confinement or halfway house. The result, prisoners are staying in institutions, institutions that are understaffed, for days, weeks and months beyond when they could be released to home confinement or halfway houses. This is defeating one of the other initiatives of the First Step Act and that was to get more people out of decaying BOP facilities and into another form of confinement that is far less expensive.”
Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Illinois)
First Step is important to Congress. When BOP Director Colette Peters appeared for a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing chaired by Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) last month, “her answer failed to address the continued shortcomings of the implementation,” Pavlo said. “There are thousands of prisoners, many minimum security, who are stuck in prison because of a lack of a computer program that simply calculates forward-looking FSA credits…This computer program was actually alluded to in declarations the BOP submitted to federal courts in 2022 stating that it would be implemented ‘soon.’ Over a year since those declarations, there is still no program to accurately calculate when a prisoner will leave an institution.”
The BOP is facing a substantial halfway house bed shortage as well. There is also the issue of insufficient halfway house space. Unlike HH/HC placement for prisoners without FSA credits, 18 USC 3624(g)(2) does not give the BOP discretion. Subsection 3624(g)(2) says that if a prisoner is eligible (has FSA credits not already applied to a year off of the sentence), he or she “shall be placed in prerelease custody as follows,” describing halfway house or home confinement. There’s nothing hortatory about it. The BOP is required to put the prisoner in HH/HC. Excuses not accepted.
Pavlo argued that “the only way to address this situation is to implement a task force to move prisoners through the system and catch up from the failures of the past few years. Systemic challenges of shortages of staff and augmentation which takes away staff like case managers from their jobs, cause continued problems. The BOP needs to get caught up, move prisoners along and develop reliable systems that will assure that the FSA is implemented as the law requires. While the BOP has made great strides, these last challenges of full implementation can be achieved by focusing a concerted effort on three issues; fixing the calculator, assessing the prisoners who will soon be going home as a result of that computer fix, and expanding halfway house capacity to handle them.”
We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
ADVOCACY GROUPS BLAST DOJ/BOP FIRST STEP ACT PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTATION
An Apr. 12 letter to the Dept. of Justice from the American Civil Liberties Union, writing on behalf of 10 other advocacy groups, blasted DOJ’s selection of the Hudson Institute as host of the Independent Review Committee, which is tasked with developing the First Step Act’s risk assessment system.
The IRC is to propose a risk assessment system for use in the enabling the Bureau of Prison’s programming to reduce recidivism, for which inmates will receive extra good time that can be used to cut sentences and award additional halfway house or home confinement. The First Step Act requires that the risk assessment system be in place by July 19, but DOJ is already two months behind.
The ACLU letter complained that while the Act required that a non-partisan non-profit host organization with expertise in the study and development of risk and needs assessment tools be picked, “the Hudson Institute is… a politically conservative think tank, whose research and analysis promotes global security, freedom and prosperity…” and “there is no evidence on its website, in the form of research publications or otherwise, which remotely suggests the organization has any expertise or experience in the study and development of risk and needs assessment systems.”
The letter also warned that neither the current BOP security classification system nor the U.S. Probation Office post-conviction risk assessment protocol should be adopted as a substitute for the Act’s risk assessment system, because neither was “designed to identify specific criminogenic needs and heavily relies on static factors that classify many people who do not go on to reoffend as high risk.”
Not the right halfway house – but you could get drunk here, which is what it may take to believe that BOP will implement FIRST STEP’s transitional housing mandates.
Finally, the letter noted that since 2017, BOP has made substantial cuts in rehabilitative programming, staff, and halfway houses. “There are 25,000 people in federal prison waiting to be placed in prison work programs, at least 15,000 people waiting for education and vocational training, and at least 5,000 people are awaiting drug abuse treatment,” the letter said. “There is nowhere near enough programming to help prisoners succeed in their communities upon release and thereby reduce recidivism overall. We therefore urge BOP to begin rebuilding rehabilitative services now.”
We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
A SOBERING REPORT ON HALFWAY HOUSE AND HOME CONFINEMENT
Not the right halfway house – but you could get drunk here, which is what it may take to believe that BOP will implement FIRST STEP’s transitional housing mandates.
As Congress is on the verge of passing FIRST STEP Act, a prison reform measure which will let inmates earn substantially more halfway house or home confinement time for successfully completing programs that cut recidivism, the reality is that the BOP’s halfway house and home confinement programs needed to implement the Act may be dead on arrival.
Politico reported last week that even while inmate transfers to transitional housing (halfway house) have been delayed by many weeks and months, scores of halfway house beds lie empty (with some estimates of at least 1,000 vacant spaces) and home confinement has been drastically curtailed.
Just before he unexpectedly resigned last spring, BOP Director Mark Inch told Congress the agency is curbing transitional housing overspending of past years and streamlining operations. Yet, halfway house and home confinement are much cheaper than imprisonment: in 2017, the BOP reported it spent almost $36,300 a year to imprison an inmate, $4,000 more than the cost of halfway house placement. It costs a mere $363 a month to monitor someone on home confinement.
Politico argued that “abandoning transitional supervision aligns with Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ disputed opinion that reduced prison populations during the Obama administration are to blame for a small uptick in violent crime.” But Sessions’ policies are running headlong into those of President Trump, who has endorsed the FIRST STEP Act, which not only lets inmates earn significant additional halfway house/home confinement time for successful programming, but also directs that the BOP shall “to the extent practicable, place prisoners with lower risk levels and lower needs on home confinement for the maximum amount of time permitted…”
In 2015, more than 10,600 federal prisoners were in halfway houses. The number of inmates in home confinement — 4,600 — was up more than a third from the year before. In all, 7.1% of BOP inmates were in transitional housing. Since then, halfway house population has dropped by 28% and home confinement is in freefall, down 61% to 1,822. Most of that cut has happened in the last year. Now only 1 in 20 people under federal supervision is in transitional housing.
Judge Ricardo S. Martinez, who chairs the Committee on Criminal Law of the Judicial Conference of the United States, complained that “we are in the dark about those numbers.” He said the committee is working to establish better communication with the BOP, because, as Politico put it, “federal judges, who can sentence defendants to halfway houses, need to know how much space is available.”
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 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.
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 BOP Office of Public Affairs reported that as of January 1, 2019, the BOP was contracting for 10,408 halfway house beds. As of two months ago, the BOP contracted for 10,553 halfway house beds. Pavlo wrote that “the BOP is now telling some halfway house providers… that they are canceling some solicitations for additional capacity because of ‘budgetary and staffing considerations.’”
“BOP could look to modify those existing contracts to increase the number of beds available,” Pavlo wrote.
