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FOUR BOP FACILITIES HAVE ‘MISSIONS’ CHANGED
The Bureau of Prisons is changing the “mission” – that is, converting the populations – of four prison facilities to move the agency closer to the First Step Act’s ideal of housing prisoners within 500 road miles of their homes.
FCI Oxford (Wisconsin), FCI Estill (South Carolina) and FCI Memphis (Tennessee) will convert from male medium-security to male low-security facilities. FCI Estill Satellite Camp will flip from male minimum-security to female minimum-security.
BOP Director Colette Peters told staff in an internal memorandum, “In support of the First Step Act, the BOP has identified locations to undergo mission changes to better afford an opportunity for individuals in our custody to be housed within 500 miles of their release residence.”
The First Step Act provided that the BOP should “place the prisoner in a facility as close as practicable to the prisoner’s primary residence, and to the extent practicable, in a facility within 500 driving miles of that residence.” That directive, codified at 18 USC § 3621(b), has more holes than a Swiss cheese factory.
The provision says that the 500-mile placement is “subject to bed availability, the prisoner’s security designation, the prisoner’s programmatic needs, the prisoner’s mental and medical health needs, any request made by the prisoner related to faith-based needs, recommendations of the sentencing court, and other security concerns…”
Any BOP employee who can’t find an exception in that statutory mush that justifies keeping a New Yorker, for instance, at FCI West Coast just isn’t very motivated.
One of President Biden’s first acts in office was to order that private prisons’ contracts not be renewed. “The unintended consequences of a move that had popular support with the public,” Walter Pavlo wrote last week in Forbes, “was that it pushed those prisoners in private prisons into BOP low-security prisons across the country… Prisoners were displaced all over the country and some incoming prisoners had to serve their time far from home where bed space was available. The reclassification of these prisons to low security, have the intended purpose of getting more people closer to home.”
Meanwhile, some BOP staffer’s unions are protesting Director Peters and the BOP’s chronic understaffing problems. A union protest last week near FCI Coleman, ironically enough, was broken up by local law enforcement, but not before the union took issue with the fact that the Director “won’t call inmates ‘inmates,’” said Union Advocate Jose Rojas. “She calls them ‘neighbors.’”
Union members invited onlookers to spin a roulette-style wheel prop that “represented the chance that prison staffers take every day when they have ‘neighbors’ such as the 8,000 inmates at the prison. Those ‘neighbors’ include serial child molester Larry Nassar notorious for years of abusing girl gymnasts, a Somali pirate and many of the nation’s most-hardened criminals,” The Villages-News reported.
“They don’t realize how dangerous it is. We might start seeing some ugly stuff,” Rojas said.
BOP, Mission Change for FCI Oxford Announced (June 21, 2023)
BOP, Three Locations to Undergo Mission Changes (June 13, 2023)
Forbes, Bureau of Prisons Changes in Works to Comply With First Step Act (June 23, 2023)
The Villages News, Picket permit revoked as prison guards try to issue warning in The Villages (June 22, 2023)
– Thomas L. Root