The outgoing director of the Bureau of Prisons has been called to testify before a Senate committee looking into abuse and corruption at the beleaguered federal agency.
Michael Carvajal was served with a summons to appear at a hearing later this month. The subpoena was announced Monday by Senator Jon Ossoff, chairman of the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
The committee’s call follows an Associated Press investigation that exposed systemic issues at the agency, including widespread criminal activity by staff and rampant sexual assaults at a women’s prison in California.
The Justice Department announced last week that it would replace Carvajal with Colette Peters, the director of Oregon’s prison system. The announcement came about seven months after Carvajal tendered his resignation amid mounting pressure from Congress following the AP investigation.
Although Carvajal has been impeached by the Trump administration, issuing subpoenas to compel him to appear before the Senate panel is rare, in part because Democrats control the Senate and the White House. The decision to issue a subpoena illustrates the lengths to which members of Congress and congressional investigators will go to bring additional oversight to the embattled agency that has long drawn intense public attention.
Ossoff and Sen. Ron Johnson, the committee’s top Republican, said the subpoena was issued after the Justice Department refused to make Carvajal available to testify voluntarily.
In a statement, the Justice Department said it was disappointed Ossoff issued the subpoena and said officials had cooperated extensively with the subcommittee’s work and had offered to provide a lower-level official in Carvajal’s place.
The department said it was “committed to focusing” Carvajal’s final days on preparing for Peters to take over, and said his preparation for a congressional hearing days before Peters takes control of the agency would be a distraction.
“As the Department previously explained to the Subcommittee, we believe that preparing for testimony just five business days before this critical leadership transition could divert Director Carvajal’s time and attention away from that goal,” the Department of Justice statement said. “However, we continue to work with the Subcommittee to find an acceptable solution.”
Carvajal has been at the center of numerous crises within the federal prison system. His troubled tenure included the rampant spread of the coronavirus inside federal prisons, a failed response to the pandemic, dozens of escapes, deaths and critically low staffing levels that have hampered emergency responses.
The committee’s investigation has included examining abuse, misconduct and corruption both at the US Penitentiary in Atlanta — Osoff’s home state — and in the federal prison system more broadly.
“To date, the Subcommittee has not been provided with any legal basis that would preclude Director Carvajal from testifying before the Subcommittee, and the Department of Justice continues to refuse to make him available to testify,” Ossoff and Johnson said in a joint statement.
The Biden administration had faced increasing pressure to remove Carvajal and do more to fix the federal prison system after President Joe Biden’s campaign pledge to push for criminal justice reforms. The Bureau of Prisons is one of the largest agencies of the Department of Justice, budgeted for approximately 37,500 employees and over 150,000 federal prisoners. It has an annual budget of about 8 billion dollars.
Peters will take over the agency in August.
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