Congress OKs greater prisons oversight

What happened

The Senate on Wednesday passed the Federal Prison Oversight Act, bipartisan legislation that boosts monitoring and transparency at the troubled federal Bureau of Prisons. The House passed the bill in May. 

Who said what

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), who sponsored the legislation with Sens. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), said its passage was a “major milestone” after Senate and Associated Press investigations “revealed an urgent need” to tackle “corruption, abuse and misconduct in the federal prison system.” The bill was backed by a broad coalition including prison employee unions and advocates for incarcerated people.

The legislation empowers a new independent ombudsman to collect, investigate and report complaints from staff and inmates amid “dozens of escapes, chronic violence, deaths and severe staffing shortages,” the AP said. In April, as the bill advanced in the House, the Bureau of Prisons announced the closure of its “women’s prison in Dublin, California, known as the ‘rape club'” due to “rampant staff-on-inmate sexual abuse.”

What next?

Once President Joe Biden signs the bill into law, the Justice Department’s inspector general will conduct an initial assessment of all 122 federal prisons, assigning each facility a risk score and reporting the findings and recommendations to Congress and the public. Higher-score facilities would get more frequent inspections.