The Federal Bureau of Prisons faces increasing fire from independent watchdogs for dangerous housing conditions and failing to correct problems for years.
Ultimately, those conditions can lead to greater risks for inmates, correctional employees and the public when the incarcerated are released.
This is an agency in crisis.
That is demonstrated in a long series of critical watchdog reports, including three this month, and by BOP’s inclusion last year on the Government Accountability Office’s biennial High-Risk list, because of “long-standing challenges” in assisting “incarcerated people [to] have a successful return to the community.”
“The bigger picture is that the Federal Bureau of Prisons has been a profoundly broken agency for a very long time now,” said David C. Fathi, American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project director.
Even keeping people alive is a challenge for the prison system. One report from the Justice Department’s inspector general’s office said 344 prisoners died by homicide, drug overdose, other accidents and suicide between 2014 and 2021, “with a majority of those suicides among inmates in solitary confinement,” according to an article by my colleague Perry Stein last week on the “deadly culture of negligence and staffing issues at federal prisons.”
A separate IG report this month criticizes the agency for shoddy record keeping, falsified documents and destroyed logs related to the special housing units used to discipline inmates.
Another February report, from the GAO, slams the prison agency for failing to implement most recommendations, many from a decade ago, about “restrictive housing,” which includes the special housing units and solitary confinement.
The headline on GAO’s blog about the report is blunt: “Federal Prisons Haven’t Addressed Longstanding Concerns About Overuse of Solitary Confinement.”
“I think [the Bureau of Prisons] is lacking the ability or the will to change, possibly both of those things,” said Laura Rovner, director of the University of Denver’s Civil Rights Clinic, who has represented isolated prisoners.
The report generally covers fiscal 2018 through 2022, except for an October 2023 “snapshot,” when about 12,000 people, 8 percent of the federal prison population, were in units that generally kept them isolated in their cells for all but one hour a day.
One key GAO finding is the drastic racial disparity among people sent to a special management unit (SMU), because the BOP defines them as having “unique security and management concerns.”
In keeping with studies demonstrating that Black people are treated more harshly at all steps of the criminal justice process, the report found African Americans were 59 percent of the SMU population in 2022, but 38 percent of the prison population.
The figures were just the opposite for White prisoners. They were 58 percent of the population, but just 35 percent of those in the special units.
What emerges from GAO’s report portrays an agency that makes little effort to improve. Of 87 recommendations in two prior studies, from 2014 and 2016, only 33 have been fully implemented.
“BOP has made slow progress,” GAO auditors found, in part because prison officials have not assigned appropriate staff to implement the recommendations and haven’t established timelines to get the job done.
Agency officials did not respond to questions for this column, but BOP did agree with GAO recommendations that included setting timelines for implementing recommendations and identifying causes of racial disparities.
The unfulfilled recommendations cover a range of issues, including protective custody, reentry programs and serious mental illness. GAO noted that the 2016 Justice Department study “found that the long-term placement in restrictive housing adversely impacted the mental health of incarcerated individuals diagnosed with serious mental illness.” Yet, BOP continued to place those who were seriously, mentally ill in restrictive housing from 2018 through 2022.
That can make a bad situation worse.
Johnny Perez described solitary “as a second-by-second attack on your soul.” He spent a total of three years in solitary, he said, out of 13 years of incarceration in New York state facilities. The longest stretch was 10 months.
“I went to solitary confinement for smoking pot while I was incarcerated,” said Perez, 44. He now has a degree in criminal justice and is director of the U.S. prisons program for the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.
He described solitary as torture, “absolutely.” That characterization is shared widely, including in a 2011 United Nations report that called for the “absolute prohibition” of solitary confinement more than 15 days, because it is “a harsh measure which is contrary to rehabilitation.”
First on Perez’s isolation torture list is the “extreme lack of human contact,” followed closely by little sunlight, not enough nutritious food, inadequate health care and poor grievance procedures.
“I remember stuffing tissue in my ear, so the roaches don’t get in at night while sleeping,” Perez said. “And most importantly,” he continued, are “the irreversible effects for almost everyone that goes into those spaces,” which create “a sense of hopelessness, despair,” and in some cases of serious mental health consequences.
The tiny cells are oppressively hot in the summer and frigid in the winter. “I’m 6 feet tall,” he said. “If I stretch both my hands out, I can touch both walls.” Many isolation cells have no windows and the isolated have no watches, leading them to lose track of time.
Perez recalled hearing “people yelling, screaming, banging on their doors … just bored or whatever, … reacting to this environment which is sensory deprived.”
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, supports Colette S. Peters who became BOP director in 2022, but said he was “extremely disappointed” and “disheartened” that BOP officials “have not implemented multiple recommendations to curb restrictive housing. This issue has been studied extensively, and now is the time for action.”
Ready for action is the End Solitary Confinement Act, which was introduced last year by two Democrats, Rep. Cori Bush (Mo.) and Sen. Edward J. Markey (Mass.). It would prohibit solitary confinement except in specific, limited circumstances and declares it “a form of torture.”
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