American prisons are a mess. Congress just passed a fix.
Plus: bipartisan action on prescription drugs, FAFSA, and congressional stock trading.
Hi, all! Happy Friday. Obviously I’ll be covering President Biden’s press conference — and his fight to remain atop the Democratic ticket — in today’s newsletter. But my promise to you with Wake Up To Politics has always been that I’ll also cover the under-the-radar stories you don’t see elsewhere, especially in regards to what’s actually getting done in government.
And the truth is, not much changed in the presidential race yesterday — but it was a fairly productive week in Congress! So that’s what I’m leading off with. Let’s dive in:
America’s prisons are in crisis.
That’s not me saying that. Colette Peters, the director of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP), testified as much to a Senate committee earlier this year, explicitly using the word “crisis” to describe the agency she leads.
Peters was largely referring to staffing problems: according to CBS News, the BOP — which oversees the nation’s 122 federal prisons and 158,000 federal inmates — is short-staffed by about 40%. As a result, teachers, nurses, doctors, secretaries, and other prison employees often end up filling in as guards.
But that isn’t the only issue plaguing the BOP (although it’s surely connected to all the others, since secretaries aren’t exactly trained as correctional officers). A recent Justice Department report found that chronic failures at the agency led to hundreds of inmates dying of homicides or suicides in the last decade. Thousands more have died from treatable health conditions due to a lack of medical care. From 2019 to 2021, more than 100 BOP employees were arrested, including several for sexual abuse, which is rampant at many women’s prisons. During the same timespan, 29 prisoners escaped from federal facilities; some were never found.
A string of reports from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a federal watchdog, have excoriated the BOP, often calling for increased oversight at the agency. Last year, the BOP was added to the GAO’s “High Risk List,” a list of 37 governmental “programs and operations that are vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement, or in need of transformation.”
Enter the Federal Prisons Oversight Act, which lawmakers sent to President Biden’s desk this week. The bipartisan bill passed the House in a 392-2 vote in May; the Senate approved it unanimously on Wednesday.
If signed by Biden, the measure will create the BOP’s first comprehensive oversight regime. Under the bill, the Justice Department inspector general (IG) will be mandated to conduct inspections of all 122 federal prisons and assign each facility a risk score, based on “staffing levels,” “access to adequate physical and mental health resources,” “incidences of physical assault, neglect, or sexual abuse,” and other factors. (The IG will also be required to consult “formerly incarcerated people, family or representatives of incarcerated people, and community advocates” as part of their investigations.)
The IG’s reports, which will include recommendations for each prison, will all be released to the public — and the BOP will be required to respond with a corrective action plan to each one within 60 days. The IG will then conduct additional inspections (“announced or unannounced”) to see whether BOP has complied with its corrective action plans, with prisons scored as higher-risk receiving “more frequent inspections.”
The bill will also create an independent ombudsman position at DOJ, who will be charged with investigating the “health, safety, welfare, and rights of incarcerated people and staff.” The ombudsman will set up “multiple internal ways” for federal prisoners to submit complaints about their treatment, as well as a secure phone hotline and online form where family members and representatives of incarcerated people can submit complaints as well.
The BOP does currently have a complaint process — but, as of earlier this year, there was a backlog of nearly 8,000 open investigations, hundreds of which included allegations of sexual abuse. Under the new bill, the ombudsman will be required to tell complainants within 15 days whether they deem that action is warranted to respond to their allegations; they will then investigate and issue recommendations, and have the power to follow up with BOP to ensure their recommendations are being met (and to report to the Attorney General if they are not).
Importantly, the measure specifically forbids retaliation against any complainant who triggers a “proceeding, investigation, or inspection” under the bill. That provision is relevant because prisoners (female prisoners especially) have repeatedly reported being retaliated against after complaining about sexual abuse by BOP personnel.
The measure was a bipartisan production from start to finish, sponsored by Sens. Mike Braun (R-IN), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Jon Ossoff (D-GA) in the Senate and Reps. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) and Lucy McBath (D-GA) in the House. (Interestingly, McBath said her work on the legislation began as a result of her efforts to forgive the man who was imprisoned for killing her 17-year-old son, Jordan.)
The bill was endorsed by everyone from the ACLU to the ACU — that’s the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union and the right-leaning American Conservative Union, respectively.
“It’s been said that sunlight is the best disinfectant — and yet our prisons are the darkest places in the nation,” Kevin Ring, the president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, said in a statement. “With no meaningful oversight, incarcerated people and correctional officers are not safe, and our elected leaders are not even aware of the problems that need to be fixed. Families with incarcerated loved ones for years have been calling for greater transparency, safety, and accountability from our federal prisons. The [Federal Prisons Oversight Act] answers their calls.”
What else got done this week
President Biden signed the Fire Grants and Safety Act into law, with bipartisan members of Congress attending the ceremony (see above). Close readers of Wake Up To Politics will recall that the bill’s title is deceptive — its most important provision is the ADVANCE Act, which aims to substantially expand America’s nuclear energy sector. Read my report on the ADVANCE Act here.
Lawmakers sent the Debbie Smith Act of 2023 to the president’s desk. The bipartisan bill aims to address the rape kit backlog by providing state and local crime laboratories with funding to more quickly process DNA evidence from unsolved crimes. Since the original Debbie Smith Act passed in 2004, the program has directly resulted in nearly nearly 1.8 million DNA cases being processed. The measure — which passed the House unanimously in November and the Senate unanimously this week — is named for a Virginia woman who had to wait five years for her DNA evidence to be tested after being raped.
The Senate unanimously passed the Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act, a bipartisan bill that prohibits “product hopping,” which is when a pharmaceutical company winds down production of an old drug — right when its patent is about to expire — and switches patients to a new drug, in order to avoid facing competition from generic products (therefore keeping the price of the drug artificially high).
The House Education and the Workforce Committee voted 34-6, with bipartisan support, to advance a bill that would set a legal deadline of October 1 for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form to be released each year. The Education Department did not release the form util December 30 this year, which has wreaked havoc on the college financial aid process.
Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Jon Ossoff (D-GA), and Gary Peters (D-MI) introduced a bipartisan bill that would ban members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children from trading stocks. Lawmakers who violate the bill would be fined the value of their monthly salary or 10% of the value of the violating investments — whichever is higher. The measure is set to receive a Senate committee vote later this month, a first for a congressional stock trading ban.
A lot of major news outlets have reported on the BOP’s troubles through the years. But as far as I can tell, only one (the Associated Press, which has done admirable reporting on this issue) reported this week on the passage of a bill to address them.
Here at Wake Up To Politics, I’m trying to counter that bad-news bias by not only telling you about the problems — but filling you in on the solutions as well.
If you want to support that goal, I hope you’ll consider clicking below to upgrade to a paid subscription.
President Putin. Vice President Trump. And a defiant Biden.
President Joe Biden spoke to reporters for nearly an hour on Thursday, in a highly anticipated press conference — his first in eight months — aimed at tamping down concerns about his mental acuity sparked by last month’s debate.
Although he made several slip-ups — including referring to “Vice President Trump” instead of Vice President Harris, after referring to “President Putin” instead of President Zelensky, earlier in the day — Biden was steadier than during the debate, holding forth on foreign policy on the heels of the NATO summit.
“I’m not in this for my legacy,” Biden said. “I’m in this to complete the job I started.”
Ultimately, the press conference appeared to do little to end the Democratic Party’s two-week-long purgatory: Biden’s performance was strong enough to avoid an immediate cascade of new calls for his ouster — but not strong enough to stem them completely.
Soon after Biden left the podium, three more House Democrats — Reps. Jim Himes (D-CT), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee; Scott Peters (D-CA); and Eric Sorenson (D-IL) — urged Biden to withdraw, following two others who did so earlier on Thursday.
Yet another Democratic lawmaker, Rep. Brittany Peterson (D-CO), urged the same this morning, bringing the total to 18 Democratic members of Congress calling on Biden to step down.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) issued a very cryptic statement this morning saying he met with Biden last night and “directly expressed the full breadth” of House Democrats’ thoughts on the issue. Notably, Jeffries added no statement of support for Biden or indication of whether he believed the president should remain atop the ticket.
And thus, the party’s hand-wringing will continue into a third week, as leaks continue to spring out of the White House (per the New York Times, some of Biden’s own aides are trying to push him towards the exits) and speculation mounts about the roles of party leaders like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi (according to CNN, they have spoken privately since the debate to express their shared concerns).
“I believe I’m the best qualified to govern,” Biden said Thursday, dismissing internal critics. “And I think I’m the best qualified to win.”
It seems to me that passing a bill that calls for investigation, analysis and corrective action plans doesn’t actually solve any of the problems. The head of the prison system was recently interviewed by 60 minutes and she listed many issues that she knows but does not have the resources to address. The most critical problem is staffing and without additional funding the system will not be able to hire enough guards and support service staff in this competitive job market. It is hard to find people willing to take a difficult and yes dangerous job for the low wages correction officers are paid. And it will be almost impossible to run a prison at all if they also need to fire a bunch of corrupt and dangerous guards on top of having 40% vacancies. So yes it’s nice that everyone seems to agree on the investigation, the real proof of intention to fix our prison system will be agreeing to fund the corrective actions.
Some are wondering why Trump didn't bounce higher after The Debate, and are suggesting that Trump has reached his ceiling in support.