JOHN KIRIAKOU: US Prisons Still a Disaster Zone

The BOP had long been one of the biggest embarrassments in the federal government and Joe Biden’s administration hasn’t changed that. 

By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News

When Joe Biden took office nearly four years ago, he promised an overhaul of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the largest and best-funded entity within the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The BOP had long been one of the biggest embarrassments in the federal government with a parade of incompetent directors from both inside and outside DOJ.  

Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland probably had good intentions at the start of their term.  They probably really did want to clean up the mess in the federal prison system that has dragged on for decades.  But they failed.  

To begin with, Biden inherited Michael Carvajal as BOP director from Donald Trump.  Carvajal had been named to the job just a couple months before Biden assumed the presidency.  Carvajal was a BOP lifer.  He began as an entry-level prison guard, worked his way up into administration, became a warden, and finally made his way to BOP headquarters before finally being named as director.  

But Carvajal was a failure.  Even if the BOP’s deep-seated problems were not necessarily his doing, he was either powerless or too incompetent to do anything about them. 

Carvajal resigned in 2022 after more than 100 BOP officers were arrested for, or convicted of, serious crimes during his short tenure, including smuggling drugs and cell phones into prisons to sell to prisoners, theft from prison commissaries, committing violence against prisoners, and even one warden running a “rape club,” where he and other officials, including the prison chaplain, raped female prisoners at will. 

Carvajal finally resigned after Congress learned of the “rape club” and Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, demanded that he leave.

Carvajal’s problem was obvious from the beginning.  He brought literally no outside expertise to the job. He had never worked anywhere in his adult life other than the BOP. There would be no bold, new programs, no new ideas for reducing recidivism, no move to train prisoners to lead productive lives outside of prison. There was nothing.

The Biden administration thought they could change all that with the appointment of an outsider who had succeeded in turning around a troubled state prison system.  Colette Peters was the former head of the Oregon Department of Corrections, where she spent 10 years and managed a budget of $2 billion. 

With her documented success at turning the Oregon system around, certainly she could do the same with the BOP’s 122 prisons.  But she couldn’t.  It wasn’t her fault, of course.  It was all the fault of “understaffing.”  If she could just hire the people she needed, the job would get done.  At least, that’s what she told Forbes Magazine earlier this year.

What Peters didn’t mention in that interview was that, according to Peter Mosques, a criminal justice professor of John Jay College, the BOP is little more than an employment agency for otherwise unemployable white men with no education and no outside job experience, many of whom washed out of the military or the local police academy. 

Most of the BOP’s facilities are in tiny towns, the mountains, or farming communities, where the labor pool is very limited.  And the only people who are left there and are still looking for a job end up, well, at the BOP.  The starting pay is $21 an hour, only slightly better than they might get at WalMart.  

Forbes’ interview with Peters was notable not for the things she said — the article noted that she talked about her “accomplishments” over the course of her two-year tenure — but for what she didn’t say.  She skipped the facts that:

• The DOJ Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a damning report earlier this year criticizing the BOP for an inordinate number of preventable prisoner deaths.  In 2023, there were 187 suicides, 89 murders, 56 accidental deaths and 12 attributed to “unknown factors” in BOP prisons.  The OIG report attributed most of these deaths to “recurring policy violations and operational failures.”
• A federal judge in New York refused to send a convicted fraudster to the BOP’s Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, because the prison is “notoriously and, in some cases egregiously slow in providing medical and mental health treatment to prisoners” … lockdowns there are “tantamount to solitary confinement, which is increasingly viewed as inhumane” … and the prison’s “dreadful and grim conditions of confinement include contaminated drinking water, mold, vermin, and insects.”

• The DOJ Office of Inspector general complained that two unannounced “on-site inspections” of a BOP women’s prison in Tallahassee, Florida found “alarming conditions,” including outdated and rotten food being served to prisoners; rodents, insects, and their droppings being pervasive throughout the food preparation areas; cracked walls and ceilings conducive to rodent movement throughout the facility; and unhygienic bathroom facilities.
• A federal judge in the Northern District of California berated the BOP for its “botched and ill-conceived plan” to close the federal women’s prison at Dublin, California, the site of the so-called rape club.  The judge called the previously unannounced closure plan “hasty and ill-timed” and allowed a class-action suit by prisoners to go forward.  The judge also called the BOP “a dysfunctional mess.”
• A federal judge in Virginia sentenced a BOP lieutenant to three years in prison for failing to intervene in a prisoner’s preventable death.  A BOP guard reported to the lieutenant twice that the prisoner was in medical distress.  But the lieutenant denied two requests for emergency assistance, instead allowing the man to spend the last 100 minutes of his life on the floor of his cell.  The DOJ inspector general called the lieutenant’s actions “appalling indifference leading to a needless loss of life.”
• Yet another Office of Inspector General report found that the BOP was engaging in “sham accreditations,” where the country’s primary prison accreditation organization, the American Correctional Association, was simply publishing the BOP’s own self-serving internal findings as their own reports, rather than actually conducting accreditation investigation.  And then they charged the BOP $2.75 million for their trouble.  That contract was not renewed.

It’s generally not my nature to be a complainer.  But the BOP is a disaster.  And that’s not just me saying it.  That the Justice Department’s own inspector general, a bevy of federal judges, senior members of Congress, and outside human rights and prisoners’ rights groups. 

It doesn’t matter if the BOP director happens to be a formerly successful outsider or a failed insider (or during the Trump administration, the former director of Guantanamo).  They’re all bad.  They all fail. 

Maybe it’s time for our elected leaders to take a lesson from our European friends and allies who tend to emphasis rehabilitation over punishment and don’t have the same kind of criminal justice problems.  We just simply can’t fix this on our own.

John Kiriakou is a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act—a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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