President Donald Trump handily won the election and will be sworn in as the 47th president in January 2025. As a result, we all know change is coming throughout the government but the differences in the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) will likely be dramatic.
Trump has promised to restart the death penalty. Attorney General Merrick Garland made an announcement shortly after President Joe Biden took office, saying he was imposing a moratorium on federal executions while the Justice Department conducts a review of its policies and procedures. While he gave no timetable on the review, it had the effect of stopping all executions of federal prisoners. The last federal prisoner executed was Dustin Higgs who was put to death by lethal injection just days before Trump left office on January 16, 2021. Look for executions to start up early in Trump’s second act.
In December 2018, Trump signed the First Step Act into law, which allows mostly minimum security prisoners to earn time off of their sentence and increased time in the community at the end of their sentence. While the BOP has made great strides in implementing the First Step Act, problems persist six years after Trump signed the law. Plaguing the BOP has been coming up with a way to calculate credits to reduce sentences as well as finding more community housing (halfway houses) for prisoners. The First Step Act was also intended to cut costs by returning prisoners to the community sooner. With cost cutting sure to be on the Trump agenda, look for more pressure to reduce prison populations, which could be good news for those who are eligible for First Step Act credits.
Biden also stopped another Trump initiative; private prisons. Long plagued by inhumane conditions and the unsavory reality of a private company run to detain private citizens, private prisons seemed to have no future. However, Trump embraced private enterprise to solve social problems. While the BOP is not using any private prisons, look for Trump to ramp it up, particularly when it comes to housing non-US citizens. Shares of private prison companies GEO Group and CoreCivic saw their shares prices spike the day after the election. Wall Street knows what is about to happen on this front.
The BOP also has staffing issues in that they cannot attract enough people to fill the open positions they have. Trumps showed little mercy when he took office and called for a hiring freeze across the government, including the BOP. A 2018 spending plan from the Department of Justice recommended a cut of 6,132 jobs at the BOP. Do not look for that cut to be reversed but look for an unhappy Trump look for more ways to cut costs at the BOP. In 2018 when Trump made the cuts the BOP’s budget was $7.1 billion. The BOP has asked for $8.6 billion in FY2025 and another $3 billion to bring its facilities up to date. Spending at these levels is simply not going to happen.
There are prisoners who are on home confinement on CARES Act. The CARES Act, part of the law to meet the challenges of the COVID-19 epidemic, allowed health-compromised prisoners to serve their sentence on home confinement. That program was discontinued in April 2023 but many prisoners are still on home confinement. When Trump was in office the first time, his Office of Legal Counsel issued a memorandum calling for the return of those prisoners on home confinement back to prison once the pandemic was over. In December 2021, Biden’s Office of Legal Counsel issued its own memorandum giving the BOP the ability to decide if prisoners would be returned …. none were. There are now only a few hundred prisoners out on CARES Act but many of them have years to go on their sentence. It is uncertain if a new memorandum will be issued by Trumps administration but he made a statement the first time around.
Finally, Trump made a dramatic hire for a BOP Director when he hired retired general Mark Inch to head the agency. Inch lasted about 8 months in the job and suddenly resigned. After that, Hugh Hurwitz stepped in as acting Director and was close to getting the Director position when Jeffrey Epstein hung himself at MCC New York while awaiting trial. Hurwitz was reassigned then retired when Michael Carvajal, a lifelong BOP employee who moved his way up through the ranks from corrections officer. Carvajal butted heads with Congress who would eventually call of this ouster. Carvajal resigned in early 2022 and the current Director Colette Peters, an outsider from the Oregon Department of Corrections took over in August 2022.
While Peters has a good relationship with Congress, their patience may wane as the BOP’s challenges make the agency one of the most difficult to manage in all of government. Many speculate that Trump will want his own person in the job, particularly when he sees the state of the BOP today (staff shortages, infrastructure problems, no capacity at halfway houses and poor morale). Peters might last a while, but Trump will certainly be watching.
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