The federal prison population has steadily increased in the last three decades, forcing taxpayers to spend billions of dollars, shifting funds away from investigators and prosecutors, a new report says.
“Since Fiscal Year 2000, the rate of growth in the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) budget is almost twice the rate of growth of the rest of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ),” said Nancy G. La Vigne, Ph.D., in a November 2013 report addressing the cost-effective strategies for reducing recidivism.
Since 1980, the population in federal prisons has increased nearly tenfold, according to La Vigne’s statement before the Committee on Judiciary United States Senate.
La Vigne is director of the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute. She represents more than 30 researchers who study a variety of crime and justice issues. They have been managing the Federal Justice Statistics Resource Center for 20 years.
These researchers work on behalf of the federal government, La Vigne said. They clean, code, and “analyze data from a wide array of federal criminal justice agencies including the BOP, the Administrative Office of the Courts, and the United States Sentencing Commission.”
“Our overarching conclusion is that it will require changes to both sentencing and release policies to reduce the federal prison population to levels that are within their rated design capacity,” said La Vigne.
According to La Vigne, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) will experience “continued growth” in the future. Currently its inmate population is more than 219,000.
“With each passing year, the federal government has had to allocate more resources to the federal prison system at the expense of other critical public safety priorities,” La Vigne said in November (2013).
A number of members of the Committee, Congress, the Attorney General’s office, researchers, administration officials, and bipartisan policy advocates concluded that federal prison “growth and its associated costs are unsustainable.”
The conclusion is based on “Fiscal impact, overcrowding risks, fairness and equity concerns, and inefficient resource allocation,” it was reported.
Indeed, “the federal prison population would need to decline by over 50,000 inmates to be operating prisons within their rated capacity,” La Vigne said.
Senate Bill 619, The Justice Safety Valve Act of 2013, is one legislative proposal to alleviate overcrowding, La Vigne reported.
The law would give judges more authority to “depart below the statutory mandatory minimum penalty for offenders whose case-specific characteristics and criminal histories are inconsistent with a lengthy minimum sentence,” it was reported.
Another legislative alternative, according to La Vigne, is to transfer BOP inmates to community corrections or do early releases.
“Research indicates that in the states, the early release of inmates has no significant impact on recidivism rates,” La Vigne report said.
Other approaches to reduce this size of the BOP population include “instructing prosecutors to modify charging practices,” allow low risk inmates to earn more credit for extra time off, reduce drug sentences, release of elderly inmates, parole the terminally ill through compassionate releases and increase the transfer of foreign nationals.
According to the Office of the Inspector General, nearly one-fourth of the BOP population are not U.S. citizens, but “less than 1 percent of foreign nationals are transferred through the International Prisoner Transfer Program.”
La Vigne reported that federal prisons are currently housing inmates by over one-third of design capacity. These figures are expected to grow in years to come, and this may make prisons more dangerous while also affecting reentry programs that typically reduce recidivism.
La Vigne said the changes to reduce the federal prison population require statutory changes, or policy changes, adding “lengthy drug sentences have been the biggest driver of growth in the federal prison population.”
La Vigne concluded by saying, “Aggressive action is needed to stem the tide of prison population growth,” and that “Many states have done so and are already reaping the benefits of cost savings at no risk to public safety.”
