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Last week, Inspector General Michael Horowitz sent a memorandum to the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General concerning “Top Management and Performance Challenges Facing the Department of Justice.” The first identified challenge? “Addressing the Persisting Crisis in the Federal Prison System,” namely the system’s ever escalating cost, which consumes a significant percent of DOJ’s budget, and safety and security issues stemming from chronic overcrowding.

Containing the Cost of the Federal Prison System

The costs to operate and maintain the federal prison system continue to grow, resulting in less funding being available for the Department’s other critical law enforcement missions. Although the size of the federal prison population decreased for the first time since 1980, from 219,298 inmates at the end of FY 2013 to 214,149 inmates at the end of FY 2014, and the Department now projects that the number of inmates will decrease by 10,000 in FY 2016, the downward trend has yet to result in a decrease in federal prison system costs. For example, in FY 2000, the budget for the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) totaled $3.8 billion and accounted for about 18 percent of the Department’s discretionary budget. In comparison, in FY 2014, the BOP’s enacted budget totaled $6.9 billion and accounted for about 25 percent of the Department’s discretionary budget. During this same period, the rate of growth in the BOP’s budget was almost twice the rate of growth of the rest of the Department. The BOP currently has more employees than any other Department component, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and has the second largest budget of any Department component, trailing only the FBI.  The Department’s leadership has acknowledged the dangers the rising costs of the federal prison system present to the Department’s ability to fulfill its mission in other areas. Nevertheless, federal prison spending continues to impact the Department’s ability to make other public safety investments, as the Department’s FY 2015 budget request for the BOP is a 0.5 percent increase from the enacted FY 2014 level.

Our work has identified several funding categories where rising prison costs will present particularly significant challenges in future years. For example, inmate healthcare costs constitute a rapidly growing portion of the federal prison system budget. According to BOP data, the cost for providing healthcare services to inmates increased 55 percent from FY 2006 to FY 2013. The BOP spent over $1 billion on inmate healthcare services in FY 2013, which nearly equaled the entire budget of the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Continue reading

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Following news of Attorney General Eric Holder’s intention “to leave the Justice Department as soon as his successor is confirmed” comes a story today from Joe Palazzolo at the Wall Street Journal that next week the Attorney General will announce a significant shift in DOJ policy: “federal prosecutors no longer will ask criminal defendants who plead guilty to waive their right to appeal over bad legal advice.” I wrote about these untenable waivers several years ago:

[…]waiving the right to challenge constitutional and other legal errors concerning the process by which a conviction is obtained is another matter entirely, and thus a cause for concern as it pertains to the appeal and postconviction waiver language that federal prosecutors routinely insert into plea agreements consistent with the U.S. Attorney’s Manual. (See 9 USAM: Criminal Resource Manual 626.) These provisions look to leave defendants with no meaningful chance at postconviction relief regardless of whatever meritorious issue may later present.[…]

An equally obvious problem is that these waivers work to insulate the plea and government and defense counsel’s respective actions from any review. Importantly, ethics bodies in five of six jurisdictions, which have considered the question, have issued opinions excluding ineffective assistance of counsel claims from the scope of permissible postconviction waivers.

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OSHA has announced that its January 2014 investigation of FCI McDowell (WV) found that “correctional officers and other staff” there were exposed to “bloodborne pathogens and other workplace safety and health hazards.” Ten serious violations, that is, those where “there is substantial probability that death or serious physical harm could result from a hazard about which the employer knew or should have known,” were identified.  These include McDowell’s failure to:

  • Train employees on the bloodborne pathogens policy and limitations of personal protective equipment.
  • Ensure the person conducting training was knowledgeable about the subject.
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Our firm has handled a number of child pornography cases, especially within the past few years as the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut have made these cases a high priority.  In every one of these cases, the U.S. Attorney’s Office has a standard practice of sending out notices to the victims who have been identified as being in the pictures and videos possessed by the defendant.  This can result in the victim filing a claim for full restitution from the defendant – sometimes seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars.   One of the challenges of these cases is that the victim frequently argues that the defendant must pay the full amount of the losses, even where the evidence shows that the defendant did not know or have any direct contact with the victim, and even where the defendant may have been only one of thousands of anonymous possessors of the images available for download from the Internet.

In Paroline v. United States, No. 12-8561, the U.S. Supreme Court finally addressed the question of how to determine the amount of restitution a possessor of child pornography must pay to the victim in this type of a situation.  In a 5-4 decision, the Court rejected the victim’s claim that each defendant is responsible for all of the victim’s claimed losses.  Instead, in the majority opinion written by Justice Kennedy, the Court held that the sentencing court must engage in a flexible, apportionment-type analysis:

Where it can be shown both that a defendant possessed a victim’s images and that a victim has outstanding losses caused by the continuing traffic in those images but where it is impossible to trace a particular amount of those losses to the individual defendant by recourse to a more traditional causal inquiry, a court applying §2259 should order restitution in an amount that comports with the defendant’s relative role in the causal process that underlies the victim’s general losses….The required restitution would be a reasonable and circumscribed award imposed in recognition of the indisputable role of the offender in the causal process underlying the victim’s losses and suited to the relative size of that causal role. This would serve the twin goals of helping the victim achieve eventual restitution for all her child-pornography losses and impressing upon offenders the fact that child pornography crimes, even simple possession, affect real victims.

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As I’ve previously written, not long after publicly acknowledging in 2008 that it was, for the first time, “unable to meet its mandate to provide treatment for all inmates who volunteer for and are qualified for treatment before they are released from the Bureau of Prison,” the BOP eliminated RDAPs for Spanish-speaking prisoners. Yesterday, I learned that the Bureau recently restored RDAP for Spanish only speakers. As reflected in the list of 2014 RDAP sites, Spanish-speaking RDAP is now available at FCI Miami (FL) and FMC Carswell (TX).

*HT to Marcos Hasburn

 

 

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Graduation season is approaching, which means a lot of young people will be receiving copies of Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! While flying to Terre Haute earlier this week, I starting thinking about the prisons and jails to which I’ve gone over the years and decided to make a list—list making being fundamental to the Internet. Below is an admittedly incomplete rundown. Suffice it to say that neither when graduating high school or college did the idea of frequent trips to prisons and jails cross my mind. And, it was not until years later, upon discovering that my birth mother read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters & Papers from Prison throughout her pregnancy, that a career of working for and on behalf of the accused and prisoners began to seem more than mere happenstance.

• Alexandria Detention Center (VA)

• Albany County Correctional Facility (NY)

• Allenwood FCI (PA)

• Arlington County Detention Facility (VA)

• Atlanta USP (GA) Continue reading

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On Monday, via a video message posted on the Department of Justice’s Web site, Attorney General Holder announced changes to the Bureau of Prisons’ halfway house practices. As set forth in the accompanying press release:

Among the most significant changes Holder announced is the requirement for standardized Cognitive Behavioral Programming (CBP) to be offered at all federal halfway houses. This treatment will address behavior that places formerly incarcerated individuals at higher risk of recidivism. As part of this treatment requirement, BOP is setting guidelines for instructor qualifications, class size and length, and training for all staff at the halfway houses.

Several other modifications are being made to the standard contracts that apply to federal halfway houses in order to provide greater support to returning citizens. Examples include requiring halfway houses to provide public transportation vouchers or transportation assistance to help residents secure employment, requiring all federal halfway houses to allow residents to have cell phones to facilitate communication with potential employers and family, and improving and expanding home confinement by increasing the use of GPS monitoring.

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This week, Sasha Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy is blogging “about The Modest Effect of Minneci v. Pollard on Inmate Litigants,” his “keynote article in a[n Akron Law Review] symposium called Inside America’s Criminal Justice System: The Supreme Court on the Rights of the Accused and the Incarcerated.”

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This past Sunday’s New York Times featured a profile of the Cook County Jail (IL), “[t]he largest mental health center in America.” Writing separately, Nicholas Kristof offered “[a] few data snapshots:

• Nationwide in America, more than three times as many mentally ill people are housed in prisons and jails as in hospitals, according to a 2010 study by the National Sheriffs’ Association and the Treatment Advocacy Center.

• Mentally ill inmates are often preyed upon while incarcerated, or disciplined because of trouble following rules. They are much more likely than other prisoners, for example, to be injured in a fight in jail, the Justice Department says.

• Some 40 percent of people with serious mental illnesses have been arrested at some point in their lives.

Against this backdrop comes another compelling story from Andrew Cohen, writing for The Atlantic. Cohen gives insight into the “High Security Mental Health Step-Down Unit” at USP Atlanta, “believed to be the first federal prison program ever designed and implemented to provide substantial long-term care and treatment for high-security mentally ill inmates.”

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