WASHINGTON (AP) – The outsider brought in to reform the ailing Federal Bureau of Prisons vowed Monday to hold accountable any employees who sexually assault inmates, reform archaic hiring practices and bring new transparency to an agency which has long been a haven of secrecy and cover-up. .
Colette Peters detailed her vision in a wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press, her first since becoming director nearly three months ago.
She said she wants to reorient the agency’s recruiting and hiring practices to find candidates who want to “change hearts and minds” and end systemic abuse and corruption. She would not rule out closing problem prisons, although there are no current plans to do so.
As Oregon’s prison director, Peters developed the “Oregon Way” of prison management, which aims to transform “environments within correctional facilities to be more normal and humane,” according to the state prisons website. She oversaw sharp declines in Oregon’s prison population.
Skeptics within the rank and file of the federal prison system have derided her “hug a thug” approach. Peters didn’t mind this, but offered another term: “chocolate heart.”
Peters said her ideal prison worker is as interested in preparing inmates to return to society after their sentence as she is in maintaining order while those inmates are still locked inside prison walls.
“Our job, as you’ve heard me say before, is not to make good prisoners. It’s about making good neighbors,” Peters said. “They’re coming back into our communities, and so we need to hire the right people on the front lines with that kind of thinking to help us do that.”
It’s a departure from the agency’s previous recruiting model that emphasized enforcement aspects of labor law. Peters’ approach is similar to how prisons are run in Norway, where the focus behind bars is more on rehabilitation and promoting a humane approach.
But Peters acknowledges major obstacles to reforming the Justice Department’s largest agency, a behemoth of more than 30,000 employees, 158,000 inmates and an annual budget of about $8 billion.
Peters has visited three federal prisons so far as warden.
Two have been the sources of the agency’s biggest controversies: a federal women’s prison in Dublin, California, where the warden and several other employees have been accused of sexually abusing inmates.and the federal prison in Sheridan, Oregon, where inmates say they were denied showers during a hunger strike and approximated by a special tactical team.
On Tuesday, she is scheduled to visit the Atlanta US prison with one of the agency’s most vocal critics in Congress, Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga. Ossoff’s committee investigated the agency and clashed with its predecessorMichael Carvajal.
Peters in the interview clearly acknowledged that the agency is facing a massive staffing crisis that is at the heart of its many issues, which Carvajal had refused to do.
Short staffing has hampered emergency responses and slowed implementation of the First Step Act, a criminal justice overhaul backed by Democrats and Republicans in Congress.
“We’re looking for people who want to change hearts and minds, who want to be good neighbors, and safety is a top priority,” Peters said. “And so this is a paradigm shift, and I hope it’s one that recruits the right people.”
Peters said the staffing crisis, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, has only gotten worse as the agency looks for new ways to recruit officers and retain its staff. A 2021 AP investigation found that nearly a third of federal correctional officer positions were vacantforcing prisons to use cooks, teachers, nurses and other workers to guard inmates.
Now, the Bureau of Prisons finds itself competing not only with other law enforcement agencies and corporate employers, but also with fast food restaurants offering signing bonuses. In some cities, the biggest obstacle has been the high cost of living. And in rural communities, the agency has struggled to find many qualified applicants.
Peters also vowed to have zero tolerance for any staff member abusing their position or sexually abusing inmates in their care.
“We have to continue to hold people accountable, let people see and understand that if you engage in this kind of egregious activity, you’re going to go to jail,” she said.
A year ago, the Justice Department took the bold step of closing one of its most problematic facilities: the rundown Manhattan prison where financier Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. in 2019.
Peters says the agency has yet to determine whether the prison, the Metropolitan Correctional Center, will reopen — a task that would require a costly structural overhaul. She also isn’t ruling out closing more prisons as repair bills pile up and the inmate population shifts.
“We’re always going to analyze the infrastructure,” Peters said. “We have billions of dollars of backlogged infrastructure repairs that need to happen at all of our institutions. At some point there is a return on investment where the cost of simply repairing them is too high.”
AP reporting has revealed rampant sexual abuse and other criminal behavior by staffdozens of escapes, deaths and severe staff shortages that have hampered emergency responses.
“I said that in this room I need to hear the good, the bad and the ugly,” Peters said. “We cannot have any surprises. We need to know what’s going on within our agency so we can help.”
The Bureau of Prisons has also begun “monitoring” security cameras in prisons across the US to ensure officers are making rounds to check on inmates held in segregated housing units, a major controversy after two officers who allegedly guard Jeffrey Epstein faked. documents pretending to check it out while they were really sleeping and shopping online.
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