The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) was described by 60 Minutes reporter Cecilia Vega as ‘an agency in crisis.’ For the general public, it was the first view of the challenges facing the BOP, a branch of the Department of Justice with an annual budget of $8 billion.
BOP Director Colette Peters, the sixth BOP director in as many years, enters her second year as head of the troubled agency and, to her credit, allowed 60 Minutes to tour the women’s federal prison in Aliceville, AL. Peters, who previously headed the Oregon Department of Corrections for 10 years, was an outsider hired to succeed Michael Carvajal. Carvajal was called on to resign by members of the congress for the many problems of the BOP. Now Peters has been tasked to turn the agency around and it is proving to be quite difficult.
The issues the BOP faces are not new; staffing shortages, crumbling infrastructure, poor morale, and staff misconduct. Peters needs the support of all 36,000 BOP employees to make that change but that may be her biggest challenge. Prison staff has become more depleted since President Trump put a hiring freeze in place for the Bureau of Prisons in January 2017. The January 2017 hiring freeze was made permanent a year later. As a result, the bureau eliminated 6,000 positions nationwide, a 14 percent staffing decrease from the 43,000 positions in the system in both 2015 and 2016. When asked by Vega how many people the BOP needed to hire, Peters said she did not have a number but would have one in October 2023. Retired American Federation of Government Employees president Shane Fausey, the union representing the corrections officers in the BOP, said that the number of jobs needed to be filled is closer to 8,000.
The BOP’s population has decreased since 2013 when it topped out at just over 219,000 inmates. Today’s population is just over 158,000, however that number of those incarcerated in federal prison has increased since 2020 when the BOP attempted to reduce prison populations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many in congress believe that with reduced populations should come reduced number of workers to manage those prisons. Outdated facilities, poor morale and a failure to attract new workers has led to an inefficient work force. As Peters and her staff look at staffing levels in the future, it will certainly not come close to the 8,000 mentioned by Fausey. This gap has led to friction between management and labor, something that needs to be addressed in order to implement needed change.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report in 2021 about the BOP’s reliance on overtime and augmentation, non-correctional officers doing correctional officer work, to supplement the staff shortages. Today, the BOP is still grappling with staffing shortages even though nobody seems to agree on the proper amount of staffing. Retention bonuses and recruiting drives have not kept up with the number of people leaving the agency.
FCI Aliceville, the prison toured by 60 Minutes, is one of the BOP’s newest facilities which opened in 2013. Many of the BOP’s facilities are old and crumbling, some are over 100 years old. Two unannounced inspections by the Office of Inspector General in 2023 of the operations of FCI Tallahassee and FCI Waseca, found mold, broken cameras, rotten food and shortages of medical care. The BOP has stated that it needs over $2 billion to improve the conditions at its 122 prison compounds. However, those funds must be approved by Congress who have yet to release anything near that amount and are poised for further cuts.
The BOP had hoped to realize some reduction in its inmate population through the First Step Act legislation signed into law by President Trump in December 2018. However, that too has been plagued by problems with many inmates, mostly minimum security, who languish in prison because of misinterpretations of the law, computer glitches and shortages of residential reentry centers to place inmates in community settings instead of prison.
The BOP has had difficulty hiring people because the economy remains strong and attracting new people to work inside of prisons is difficult. One of the best ways to recruit people is through those who already work there but the staff is unhappy. The BOP ranks last in government agency employee satisfactionand there are no signs this is going to improve anytime soon.
Finally, since 60 Minutes was at FCI Aliceville, a women’s facility, Vega asked Peters about staff misconduct related to sexual abuse of female inmates where a report estimated that 75% of BOP female facilities had reported such abuse. Most notably, FCI Dublin, a women’s prison in California referred to as the “rape club,” had eight former employees face criminal charges for abuse. Among them, former warden Ray Garcia, who was convicted in 2022 of molesting inmates and forcing them to pose naked in their cells. Also arrested was the chaplain at FCI Dublin. Asked whether the female inmates deserve an apology for their treatment in prison, Peters said, “no,” but acknowledged that inmates deserved better.
It was not a good look for the BOP, but the challenges are complicated.
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Article originally published on Forbes.com by Walter Pavlo (Jan 29, 2024)
