The Broken BOP Consistently Chooses the Wrong Approach
During the second inauguration of Donald Trump, you never saw a more interested group of people than what you saw in the TV room at FMC Lexington. All the prisoners – white, black or Hispanic – all watched as he was sworn in. They were particularly interested because of his promise to bring in DOGE to clean up the most inept, wasteful, and fraudulent administrations of the US government, of which the BOP is one. The BOP has won the last place out of all government agencies for five years in a row.
The prisoners are tired of the theft from the kitchen that doesn’t allow them to have balanced meals, the rampant drug use, the “random” drug checks (that always happen to be in the cleanest rooms because the guards don’t want to have to do the paperwork to take someone to the SHU), the extra long holding periods before sending prisoners with camp points to the minimum security camps and putting people in programs so late that they get out after they would have gotten out if they had just skipped the programs. They are tired of a mismanaged commissary that is only half-stocked with what it should have and never being allowed to buy toenail clippers, cranberry juice or Pepto Bismol.
There was a strong belief by the prisoners that the BOP would be one of the first agencies looked at and cleaned up. So far, they stand disappointed, even more so because of a recent publication that says “Effective immediately, all inmates releasing to the community under Second Chance Act (SCA) authority after April 21, 2025 will have dates adjusted in order to bring the Residential Reentry Management (RRM’s more commonly known as halfway houses) Branch cost centers into alignment with the Federal Bureau of Prisons appropriated funding levels until further notice. This guidance will remain in place pending assessment of Bureau’s future budgets. Placements will be adjusted as follows:
SCA Placements – Effective immediately, all SCA pending placements will be reduced to a maximum of 60 days.
Cases based solely on SCA eligibility – Cases where SCA time is in addition to First Step Act Credits (FTC’s). Earned & applied FTC’s will not be changed, while SCA time will be limited to a maximum of 60 days.
Auto-Calculator Change – Effective 3/31/25, the auto-calculator will be updated to reflect a default to zero days for SCA placement days (instead of the previous 365 days).”
In brief, what this is saying that the BOP has a budget cut, but instead of pushing more people out the door quicker to their lowest cost center (the HWH’s) thereby cutting their total costs, the BOP is electing to restrict inmates from getting out into these HWH’s as a pathway to freedom, jobs and reuniting with their families, friends and support networks. Many prisoners have built up lots of SCA credits that they have built up over time through programming, classes, self-help courses like GED, etc. Now they are being told that this doesn’t matter because now they will only get 60 days.
When the SCA came out in 2017, it stated that “prisoners shall get up to one year of HWH time.” Currently, when prisoners had a home and supporting family nearby, the prisoners were transferred to home confinement with an electronic monitoring device, thereby opening up another bed to a prisoner who may not have an outside support network, may be homeless, jobless and with no prospects. These individuals need more than 60 days to get their life in order, especially if they have earned them over time and were expecting to get out on a certain date – a date that has now been pushed back by a BOP policy that makes no sense.
