Tag Archives: Warren

Senators Denounce BOP-ACA ‘Pas de Deux’ (Which Is A More Refined Way To Describe a ‘Circle Jerk’) – Update for March 7, 2024

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We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

THREE SENATORS DEMAND BOP CUT TIES WITH ACA

I agonized over this story. Not because of the content, which is as unsurprising as it is deplorable. But rather, as I asked my wife of 45 years, is it appropriate to use the term “circle jerk” in the LISA Foundation posts?

circlejerk240307I mean, the term really fits. The Federal Bureau of Prisons pays the American Correctional Association to inspect its facilities. Well, not really. The BOP pays ACA to give glowing accreditations to its facilities. As a report issued by the Dept of Justice Inspector General last November found, the BOP doesn’t really want its prisons inspected by outsiders, even friendly outsiders like ACA inspectors. Rather, the BOP is quite happy to inspect itself and then report the results to the ACA, which issues its seal of approval based on the BOP’s self-evaluation.

Sort of like giving yourself a physical, telling the doctor the results, and having the physician issue a clean bill of health based on your evaluation. Or a highly choreographed pas de deux. Or maybe… yeah, sort of like a circle jerk. The BOP pays the ACA, the ACA lets the BOP OK itself, the BOP trumpets its accreditation to the public, and pays the ACA.

As my wife says, “You couldn’t make this s*** up.” A little salty, but a spot-on observation.

wobegon240307The IG’s report said that instead of providing an independent evaluation of BOP, the ACA “relied on the prisons’ own internal reports during reaccreditation reviews.” In other words, as the DOJ put it, “it appears the BOP is, in effect, paying ACA to affirm the BOP’s own findings.”

Last week, three US senators wrote to the Attorney General and BOP Director Colette Peters complaining that BOP reliance on the ACA for accreditation “has proven to be little more than a rubber stamp, and the BOP’s contract with the ACA has been a waste of taxpayer dollars. We urge the BOP not to renew its ACA accreditation contract when it expires.” The ACA contract, covering all of the BOP’s 122 facilities, is worth $2.75 million.

ACAaward240307The senators, Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey (both D-MA) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), complain that while “the ACA claims that ‘[a]ccreditation is awarded to the ‘best of the best’ in the corrections field,’ in practice, ACA accreditation is awarded to virtually every facility that pays the accreditation fee.” The letter argues that “given the critical need for meaningful oversight of BOP facilities and the ACA’s complete failure to provide it, the BOP should not renew its ACA contract after it ends in March 2024. The ACA’s accreditation system is ineffective at best, and at worst misleads the public to believe that a failing facility’s operations are adequate. We urge you to identify alternative means of oversight that involve genuinely independent, rigorous audits of each BOP facility.”

They are too polite to call it one big circle jerk. Which it is.

The Appeal, Nonprofit Prison Accreditor Perpetuates Abuse And Neglect, Senators Say (February 29, 2024)

Letter from Senator Warren et al. to Atty General and BOP Director (February 28, 2024)

Dept of Justice OIG, Audit of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Contract Awarded to the American Correctional Association (November 2023)

– Thomas L. Root

A Couple of Short Takes – Update for December 12, 2023

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We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

LONELY, I’M MR. LONELY…

Democratic senators introduced legislation last Tuesday that would largely ban the Federal Bureau of Prisons from using solitary confinement.

solitary170721The End Solitary Confinement Act, a companion to a bill, H.R. 4972, introduced last July, would prevent inmates and detainees from being segregated alone for more than four hours to de-escalate emergency situations and, even then, require staff members to meet with them at least once an hour.

Similar to the House bill, the Senate version entitles incarcerated people to at least 14 hours of daily time out of their cells, including access to seven hours of programming meant to address topics such as mental health, substance abuse and violence prevention.

The Senate legislation was introduced by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, both D-MA; Bernie Sanders, I-VT; and Peter Welch, D-VT.

S.____ [no number yet], End Solitary Confinement Act

H.R. 4972, End Solitary Confinement Act

NBC, Bill to ‘end solitary confinement’ in federal institutions introduced in Senate (December 5, 2023)

VOTING IN PRISON

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Sen Peter Welch (D-VT) introduced bills in their respective chambers last week that, if passed, would grant people the right to vote in federal elections while in prison.

vote160726The Inclusive Democracy Act is unlikely to advance in the divided Congress, where Republicans narrowly control the House of Representatives and Democrats control the Senate.

The lawmakers acknowledged the headwinds to the legislation, their concession that passage in this Congress is very unlikely.

Reuters, Democratic lawmakers unveil bill to give people in US prisons right to vote (December 6, 2023)

HR 4852, The Inclusive Democracy Act

– Thomas L. Root

BOP Cooks Books, Congress Stirs Pot – Update for April 6, 2021

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We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

BOP COOKING THE COVID BOOKS, ACLU SAYS

White-collar crime inmates could learn something about slick accounting from the BOP.

cookbooks210406Up until five weeks ago, the BOP reported the total number of inmates who had tested positive for COVID-19, adding to the tally daily as new cases arose. As I reported last week, since February 24, the BOP has been changing the number daily by not just adding new cases, but by subtracting inmates who had tested positive in the past but who were no longer in custody. This accounting legerdemain has let the BOP understate the number of inmate cases by at least 1,115 through the end of March, which has reduced the positivity rate by a point, from 43.77% (had those inmates remained on the rolls) to 42.75% without them.

The Marshall Project reported the trickery last week, noting its weekly COVID prison “data no longer includes new cases from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which has had more prisoners infected than any other system. In early March, the bureau’s totals began to drop because they removed cases of anyone who was released, a spokesman said. As a result, we cannot accurately determine new infections in federal prisons.”

The ACLU and other prison watchdog groups contend the BOP’s testing procedures are inadequate. According to the Riverfront Times, Sharon Dolovich, the director of the UCLA Law COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project, said, “We know that those are under-counts because there are many facilities that are reporting zero, or under ten or under twenty infections,” Dolovich says. “And both because of what we know from COVID, and from what we’ve seen in countless facilities a year into the pandemic, we know that if you’re a prison with twenty infections, you have many more than twenty people who are infected.”

Maria Morris, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, said that BOP officials are motivated to under-test and therefore to under-count infections. “And then they can say COVID isn’t a problem in our facilities. ‘Look at how low our numbers are,'” she told the Riverfront Times.

A BOP spokesperson responded that BOP employees work closely with local health departments to ensure priority testing is provided to staff who are in close contact with COVID-19-positive personnel, while the federal prison agency has obtained a national contract to perform all staff testing.

battleplan210406“Whatever policies they have on paper aren’t actually being implemented,” Dolovich replied. “So they could tell you things that actually sound good in theory. But when you actually talk to people incarcerated in the various facilities, they will tell you that the reality is very different.”

Even before the BOP’s latest numbers game, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) reintroduced the Federal Correctional Facilities COVID-19 Response Act (S.328 in the Senate) to address inadequacies in the BOP’s COVID response.

The legislation would require correctional facilities to begin providing free, weekly COVID-19 testing and vaccines to both the incarcerated and their employees and assure that they offer free medical care to those who test positive for it. Oversight would include requiring these facilities to submit weekly testing data to the Department of Justice, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and state public health officials. CDC officials would be dispatched to sites where outbreaks emerged within 72 hours.

BOPCOVID-19-200622“The Department of Justice’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been unacceptable and has placed nearly 2.3 million incarcerated people in danger,” Booker said. “It is well known that people in prison and jail tend to have much higher rates of underlying health issues than the general public, and the conditions of confinement make social distancing virtually impossible. As a result, people in prison and jail are disproportionately contracting and dying of COVID-19.”

The BOP ended yesterday claiming only 371 sick inmates. The number of sick staff, however, remains stubbornly at about where it was a week before, 1,268. COVID is still present in 116 facilities. While the BOP claims generally to have delivered 110,489 shots in arms, its detailed listing as of last Friday reveals only 19.2% of the inmate population has been vaccinated.

The Marshall Project, A State-by-State Look at Coronavirus in Prisons (April 2, 2021)

The Riverfront Times, Why Did a St. Louis Man Die in a Federal Prison Coronavirus Hotspot? (March 24, 2021)

Homeland Preparedness News, Legislation to provide greater oversight of federal prisons’ COVID-19 efforts reintroduced to Congress (April 5, 2021)

S.328, Federal Correctional Facilities COVID–19 Response Act 

– Thomas L. Root

BOP Fiddles, COVID Burns – Update for October 14, 2020

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We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

HEY, FATSO! YOU’VE GOT COVID-19!

livebutonce201014The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cranked up its warning about obesity and COVID-19 last week. Last spring, if you had a BMI over 40 (6 feet tall and 295 lbs), you were at risk. At the end of June, that dropped to a BMI of 30+. That made a 6-feet tall guy weighing 221 lbs at risk.

Last week, the link between extra pounds and severe Covid-19 grew stronger as the CDC said that people who are merely overweight, not just the obese, may be at high risk of serious disease from the infection. Now, the risk starts with a BMI of 25. Besides the merely overweight (62% of America), smoking has been added to the risk-factor list.

The BOP, which has provided daily COVID-19 numbers since March 2020, dropped weekend reports a few weeks ago. Last Friday, the agency didn’t bother to update its numbers from the day before. Yesterday.s report had 1,745 sick inmates, 736 sick staff, COVID-19 in 119 institutions (98% of all facilities) and 135 inmate deaths.

The latest to die was Robert Pierce, a 52-year old Big Spring inmate, who fell ill September 18 and died last Friday. Meanwhile, the news media reported COVID-19 increases at USP Allenwood, Petersburg Medium, Raybrook and McDowell.

In a pair of letters to Attorney General William P. Barr and BOP Director Michael Carvajal, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) suggest that the agency’s response to coronavirus outbreaks in federal prisons is failing, and they question the BOP’s reliance on solitary confinement to isolate sick prisoners rather than granting compassionate release.

The Washington Post reported last week that “Federal prisoners, corrections staff, government inspectors and civil rights advocates have complained for months that the BOP’s strategies, when useful, are inconsistently applied. The overall inadequate response is leaving a vulnerable population at risk of infection and creating major vectors for transmission more than seven months into the pandemic.”

The BOP’s COVID death toll “is mounting evidence that efforts to contain the virus within BOP facilities are failing,” Durbin Warren wrote to Barr and Carvajal in one of the Oct. 2 letters, which were viewed by The Washington Post.

plague200406The Post previously reported that prison staff have raised concerns about a lack of personal protective equipment and unsafe workplace conditions — issues that have prompted federal employees to sue the government. According to reports by the DOJ Office of the Inspector General on federal corrections facilities nationwide, persistent staffing shortage has triggered regular lockdowns during the pandemic in which prisoners aren’t allowed out of their cells, are often unable to shower and face more restrictions than if they were in solitary confinement.

Bloomberg, CDC Expands COVID Risk Warning to Include Overweight People (October 8, 2020)

CDC, People with Certain Medical Conditions (October 6, 2020)

BOP, Inmate Death at FCI Big Spring (October 13, 2020)

Harrisburg Patriot, Another big increase in COVID-19 cases at the Allenwood medium-security prison (October 5, 2020)

Roanoke Times, Inmate at federal prison in Petersburg dies of COVID-19; 21 others are infected (October 7, 2020)

Washington Post, Warren, Durbin slam government’s ‘failing’ efforts to contain coronavirus in federal prisons (October 5, 2020)

– Thomas L. Root