Objective 5.2: Maintain a Safe and Humane Prison System

The federal prison and pretrial detention systems are a critical part of the Department’s criminal justice mission.  It is equally critical that prisons, detention centers, and community-based facilities are safe, humane, cost-efficient, and appropriately secure.  Adequate staffing is a prerequisite to safe and secure facilities, and we must ensure that even facilities in hard-to-recruit areas are fully staffed.  Additionally, we must pay special attention to the changing health and safety needs of incarcerated individuals.  As more individuals who have paid their debt to society complete their prison terms, we must combat barriers to reentry and proactively provide the tools and resources these individuals need to succeed and thrive.

Strategy 1: Ensure the Health, Safety, and Wellbeing of Incarcerated Individuals and Correctional Staff
The Justice Department will confine incarcerated individuals in prisons and community-based facilities that are humane, cost-efficient, and secure.  BOP will work to house inmates in the least restrictive setting necessary to ensure their own safety, as well as the safety of staff, other inmates, and the public.  BOP will also ensure that any placement in restrictive housing is regularly reviewed and that restrictive housing units maintain adequate conditions for environmental, health, mental health, and fire safety.  To these ends, BOP will seek to ensure that its hiring, retention, training, and evaluation practices are adequate to provide a safe environment for individuals and correctional staff.  The Department will continue its hiring efforts to ensure that all BOP facilities have appropriate staffing levels to provide secure facilities and expand access to programs that reduce the risk of recidivism and in-prison misconduct.  To accurately track staffing levels, BOP will develop and implement a reliable staffing model and stable hiring pipeline to anticipate vacancies and reduce the length of time positions are unfilled.

Strategy 2: Fully Implement the First Step Act and Ease Barriers to Successful Reentry
The Department must provide meaningful opportunities to incarcerated individuals for rehabilitation and reentry to the community.  The Department will seek to ensure that it is faithfully executing the First Step Act (FSA) by continuing to revalidate the risk-and-needs assessment system; update any associated policies; deliver evidence-based rehabilitative programming opportunities to all incarcerated individuals; and develop performance metrics to track compliance with the statute on an ongoing, real-time basis.  In addition, recognizing that contact with relatives and other loved ones is an important component of a rehabilitative environment, the Department will work to promote and facilitate family visitation.  More broadly, the Department will also pursue efforts to support and promote policies that reduce unfair and disparate barriers to successful reentry to society and will coordinate with other agencies to expand access to housing, employment, health care, education, and other opportunities and supports for formerly incarcerated individuals.

Strategy 3: Ensure Transparency, Accountability, and Effective Oversight of All Federal Prisons and Detention Centers
To ensure the heads of individual prisons and detention centers are accountable for their institutions, the Department will continuously monitor performance metrics.  Additionally, the Department will empower appropriate components to thoroughly investigate allegations of improper conduct or adverse conditions at institutions, hold staff accountable for misconduct, and remedy improper conditions as promptly as possible.  BOP will regularly disseminate information to the public, including data about prison populations, use of restrictive housing, availability and use of First Step Act programming, and recidivism rates of persons released from BOP custody.

Key Performance Indicators:

• Percent of funded corrections officer positions filled at the end of each fiscal year
• Percent of inmates in federal custody who have successfully completed or are enrolled in an FSA program or activity
• Percent of inquiries from external stakeholders that BOP responds to within the target response time

Contributing DOJ Components: CIV, BOP, USMS, OJP, USPC