The federal Bureau of Prisons does not need more prisons. Existing BOP prisons are critically understaffed, disrepaired, and over-filled, despite the hopes generated by the Second Chance and First Step Acts.
Six years since the First Step Act allowed some prisoners to earn non-prison placements, the BOP still hasn’t created the basic home and community confinement infrastructures needed to release thousands more prisoners over the coming years. The BOP needs more halfway house beds to address population pressures, not more prisons.
Meanwhile, critical shortages of employees prevent the BOP from completing even its most basic functions, including not providing the First Step Act programs Congress ordered to reduce sentences.
The BOP needs maintenance cash and new employees, so it can finally implement the years-old laws that will ultimately reduce populations at all security levels. Instead, a recent press release praises a new prison bringing new jobs to Letcher County. Public records show a later, lengthy presentation occurred on Aug. 28, involving questions and answers “from Congressman and Director” to an assortment of utilities operators, workforce developers, hospital executives, school leaders, and others pitching Letcher County’s value.
Local leaders have been trying to build a Letcher prison since 2016 and before, using the same “BOP needs beds” reasoning that has become obsolete and factually incorrect. Replacing “dilapidated” buildings for a shrinking prisoner population is no longer sound correctional management.
Letcher leaders are touting construction jobs that will yield to BOP (under-)employment. The reality of understaffing means that fewer than the promised 300 BOP jobs will appear. Forty percent or more of posts actually filled would go not to locals, but to BOP veterans seasoned in opening new facilities. The 300 jobs count is grossly optimistic.
AP’s Michael Balsamo and Michael Sisak documented that federal prisons are infected nationwide by employee misconduct , demoralizing levels of mandatory overtime , spoiled foodstuffs, rodent infestations , and human rights abuses. The “rape club” at FCI Dublin, California, for example, resulted in both former warden and former chaplain ( among others ) serving sex abuse sentences. Blind eyes missed deaths about to happen (for example, James Bulger ; or Jeffrey Epstein ). BOP hospitals cannot hire enough corrections officers or professional staff to meet demand. Today’s BOP is a correctional agency on its bureaucratic knees.
Collette Peters, appointed BOP director in 2022, has brought some stability as the fifth agency head over the past seven years. Director Peters recently acknowledged to a House committee that short staffing and aging buildings drive the agency’s problems. “[O]ur recruitment and retention crisis and our dilapidated facilities are at the core of nearly all our challenges,” Director Peters’ statement reads. “Low staffing-levels impact our institutions’ operations, including safety and security, medical care, education, programming, and treatment. So, our priorities are clear: recruitment, retention, employee wellness and maintenance and repair.”
Director Peters did not mention new prisons, or Letcher County. She asked for staff and repairs. A half-billion dollars could instead repair numerous dilapidated structures, while opening prison doors to scores of prisoners who have earned shorter sentences – thus relieving the very population and infrastructure stresses that a new prison might relieve, years from now.
It’s hard to argue against jobs for Letcher’s residents, any jobs, even a few still spectral jobs promised by a distressed federal agency. But federal prisons are not economic engines , however Letcher officials feel, and choosing a prison now forgoes other industry there, ever. McCreary, Clay, and Martin counties illustrate that prisons do not produce long-term economic booms . Once the BOP’s few local needs are met, the county is left with some minimum-wage service jobs supporting a correctional reservation that affects ecotourism and property values alike.
If this half-billion dollars instead funds First Step Act implementation, shrinking populations seeking sentence relief will naturally reduce needs for upper-security supervision. Minimum- and low-security inmates currently calculated for home confinement will be gone home ( without any apparent risk of inordinate recidivism ), and that space can refill with remaining prisoners reassessed for lowered-security reassignment (and plenty of upper-level federal prisoners can and should safely serve at lowered security, especially those obediently programming for First Step Act time cuts).
The BOP does not need a new prison, in Letcher County or anywhere else. Find other uses for this recovered strip mine . BOP’s leadership must first revamp, restaff, and repair a corrupted and dilapidated agency. And it must urgently build the community corrections network that Congress ordered six years ago with the First Step Act.
EJ Hurst II is a federal criminal defense lawyer living in Lexington; his practice includes two decades of advising and litigating for federal prisoners serving all ranges of Bureau of Prisons sentence.
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