The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) was described by 60 Minutes reporter Cecilia Vega as ‘an agency in crisis.’ For the general public, it was the first view of the challenges facing the BOP, a branch of the Department of Justice with an annual budget of $8 billion.
BOP Director Colette Peters, the sixth BOP director in as many years, enters her second year as head of the troubled agency and, to her credit, allowed 60 Minutes to tour the women’s federal prison in Aliceville, AL. Peters, who previously headed the Oregon Department of Corrections for 10 years, was an outsider hired to succeed Michael Carvajal. Carvajal was called on to resign by members of the congress for the many problems of the BOP. Now Peters has been tasked to turn the agency around and it is proving to be quite difficult.
The issues the BOP faces are not new; staffing shortages, crumbling infrastructure, poor morale, and staff misconduct. Peters needs the support of all 36,000 BOP employees to make that change but that may be her biggest challenge. Prison staff has become more depleted since President Trump put a hiring freeze in place for the Bureau of Prisons in January 2017. The January 2017 hiring freeze was made permanent a year later. As a result, the bureau eliminated 6,000 positions nationwide, a 14 percent staffing decrease from the 43,000 positions in the system in both 2015 and 2016. When asked by Vega how many people the BOP needed to hire, Peters said she did not have a number but would have one in October 2023. Retired American Federation of Government Employees president Shane Fausey, the union representing the corrections officers in the BOP, said that the number of jobs needed to be filled is closer to 8,000.