The Department of Justice plans to prioritize its long-standing need to reduce the federal prison population, according to a recent department memo. Federal prisons are currently at 33 percent overcapacity, which is considered a security concern.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) employs more people than any other part of the DOJ, according to the memo, and has the second largest budget in the department. The only bureau that outspends them is the FBI.
Although the prison population declined very slightly between 2013 and 2014, by 5,000 prisoners, the federal prison budget has continued to soar. Between 2000 and 2014, the BOP’s budget has grown at twice the rate of the rest of the department. DOJ spent a quarter of its discretionary budget on BOP this year.
But despite this critical overcrowding and overspending, the bureau is not even using the tools it already has in place to reduce their prison population. An Inspector General report found that the Compassionate Release Program, for example, “was not well-run.” The program is supposed to consider release for prisoners in extraordinary circumstances, like prisoners with medical emergencies, those who urgently need to care for a child, or elderly prisoners who have already served the majority of their sentence.
The International Prisoner Transfer Program, which would allow prisons to release some foreign national inmates from treaty nations to prisons in their native countries, rejected 97 percent of transfer requests in 2010. More recently, while requests for transfer increased, the actual number of prisoners transferred “remains stagnant.”
The memo details various cases of incompetency within the prison system. In one instance, the bureau bought $4 million worth of x-ray machines to combat smuggling. An audit later found that, although the machines weren’t effective for some items, the prisons had no warnings describing what the machines were and were not capable of detecting.
