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DOJ INSPECTOR GENERAL SAYS BOP FACILITIES ARE FALLING APART… AND NO ONE KNOWS WHAT TO DO

In a couple of reports issued last week that will surprise few, the Department of Justice Inspector General said the BOP is falling down, and management knows it but pretends otherwise.

In the first report, the IG said, “The BOP’s institutions are aging and deteriorating: all 123 of the BOP’s institutions require maintenance, with a large and growing list of unfunded modernization and repair needs, and three of these institutions are in such critical stages of disrepair that they are fully or partially closed.

The report found that the BOP chronically requests much less maintenance money from Congress than it needs. At the same time, Congress has set aside over $1 billion to build two new institutions, “but these funds remain largely unspent, the projects have been in the planning stages for over a decade, and the BOP’s requests each year that Congress cancel one of these projects and rescind the funds—made at the direction of the Department of Justice and the Office of Management and Budget—have not been acted on.”

The second report is more damning. Because of operational deficiencies at USP Atlanta and MCC New York (since closed), the IG set out to “assess how critical issues at BOP institutions are identified, communicated to BOP Executive Staff, and remediated.”

But the BOP Executive Staff told the IG “they had been largely aware of the long-standing operational issues at USP Atlanta and MCC New York and expressed confidence in the BOP’s existing mechanisms to communicate information about operational issues.” In light of the fact the staff knew all about the messes in New York and Atlanta but had done nothing about them, the IG “modified the scope of this review… to focus on [the] causes and the scope of the challenges, their effects on institutional operations, and the Executive Staff’s efforts to remedy them.”

The IG found that BOP internal audits of facilities were not reliable because everyone knew when the audits were to happen and, predictably enough, put on a ‘dog-and-pony’ show for the inspectors. “Executive Staff members questioned whether the BOP’s overwhelmingly positive enterprise-wide audit ratings reflected actual institution conditions,” the report said. “Validating this concern, we found that the USP Atlanta internal audit conducted in January 2020 rated USP Atlanta’s inmate management efforts as Acceptable despite identifying numerous significant issues.”

Also, the report said, the BOP’s internal investigative staff has insufficient, resulting in a “substantial backlog of unresolved employee misconduct cases.” Not only does the BOP lack adequate staff the IG found, it doesn’t even know “whether the number of staff it represents as necessary to manage its institutions safely and effectively is accurate.”

Finally, the BOP’s “inability to address its aging infrastructure as a foundational, enterprise-wide challenge [limits] its ability to remedy institution operational issues.” In other words, the agency does not have a coherent maintenance plan, but rather just tries to fix problems when they get too serious, resulting in “increasing maintenance costs and, in the most extreme circumstances, having to shutter institutions and relocate inmates because needed maintenance and repairs have resulted in unsafe conditions.”

In a written response to a draft of this report, the unlamented former BOP Director Michael Carvajal said the challenges discussed in this report were “long-established” prior to his February 2020 appointment. He added that the executive staff “acknowledged and made attempts to address these issues in some fashion, although they may not have been corrected or completed for various reasons.” Conveniently omitting the fact that in his 30-year tenure with the BOP, he had been everything from a correctional officer to a lieutenant, a captain, a correctional services administrator, an associate warden, a warden, a regional director and Assistant Director in Washington, D.C., Carvajal whined that his appointment and two-year tenure coincided with the onset of COVID-19 and that “responding to the pandemic ‘required prioritization of resources behind life safety’.”

DOJ, The Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Efforts to Maintain and Construct Institutions, Rpt No 23-064 (May 3, 2023)

DOJ, Limited-Scope Review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Strategies to Identify, Communicate, and Remedy Operational Issues, Rpt No 23-065 (May 4, 2023)

BOP, BOP Director Announces Plans to Retire (January 5, 2022)

– Thomas L. Root