BOP is really bad

 Imagine if a criminal defendant or his lawyer refused to follow court orders or the law.  They'd be put in jail before you could say not guilty.

But BOP does its own thing and really doesn't care much for the judiciary or the legislature.  In fact, it still refuses to follow the First Step Act

From Walter Pavlo in Forbes:

The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) is under new leadership but it is still suffering from decades of mismanagement. BOP Director Colette Peters began work on August 2nd of this year taking over for the Michael Carvajal. The U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a hearing on July 26 chaired by Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) who grilled outgoing BOP Director Carvajal about the failings throughout the agency. While the hearing was focused on the corruption and abuses at USP Atlanta, it was a condemnation of an agency in crisis.

Director Peters testified on September 29, 2022 in from the Senate Judiciary Committee. Unlike Carvajal’s previous, contentious testimonies before the same committee during his tenure, Peters’ was marked by cordiality and encouragement to implement the First Step Act legislation, uncover corruption among staff and provide transparency to an agency that U.S. Senator Ron Johnson had previously described as one where “People have not been held accountable.”

The First Step Act (FSA) was signed into law in December 2018. It is considered one of the most influential pieces of legislation directed at the BOP to not only encourage prisoners to participate in meaningful programs meant to rehabilitate, but to reduce the number of people in prison who pose little or no danger to society. Senator Dick Durbin was frustrated in Peters’ testimony stating that the full effects of FSA had not been implemented nearly 4 years after it being signed into law. Peters assured the Senators that an auto-calculator was completed in August 2022 that provided FSA credits to prisoners which had the effect of reducing many sentences. However, that auto-calculator was not in place at the time of the hearing, or at least it was not communicated to prisoners or the public.

According to dozens of prisoners I interviewed for this piece, calculations were not communicated to them nor reflected on BOP.gov, which tracks release dates for federal prisoners. Anticipating this computer program’s rollout that would reduce many prisoner release dates, prisoners and their families eagerly awaited the news of when they would be going home. As the weeks passed after after August, prisoners still had no news. It was not until the week of October 3rd that FSA credits started to be applied. As one prisoner told me, “I was expecting a year of credits and I got 4 months. I have no idea what happened.”

What happened is that the calculator still has errors in it. Prisoners who were transferred to a halfway house after receiving an interim calculation of their sentence, were called in and told they would be returning to prison after the new calculation took away their year. Colitha Bush, had only been in a halfway house for a few weeks when the director of her Houston facility called her and said, “I hope you’re sitting down,” Bush told me in an interview that the director told her that it had received a new sentence calculation from the BOP and she was now not due to be released until April 2024. Colitha said, “I couldn’t believe that they were going to send me back to prison after I took all those classes and did what the First Step Act required.” The following day, Colitha went into the halfway house and was informed that the BOP had corrected her date, and she could stay home. “I was relieved but the last 24 hours was pure hell thinking that I was going back,” Bush said. Bush was not the only person to receive a revised date, some of the prisoners whose sentences were commuted by President Joe Biden had their dates recalculated to state a date in the future. One of those whose sentenced was commuted but had her date recalculated said that she was concerned enough to make a few calls to make sure it was not true. Her date was corrected also.