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.
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
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.”
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.
