Under a Trump administration, differences in the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) will likely be dramatic, writes Walter Pavlo for Forbes, who notes first and foremost that Trump has promised to restart the death penalty. Shortly after Joe Biden took office, Attorney General Merrick Garland imposed a moratorium on federal executions while the Justice Department conducts a review of its policies and procedures. The last federal prisoner executed was Dustin Higgs who was put to death by lethal injection just days before Trump left office on January 16, 2021. “Biden also stopped another Trump initiative; private prisons,” Pavlo notes. “While the BOP is not using any private prisons, look for Trump to ramp it up, particularly when it comes to housing non-US citizens.”
Pavlo also notes that with Trump cost-cutting on the agenda, there will likely be more pressure to reduce prison populations, which could be good news for those who are eligible for First Step Act credits. In December 2018, Trump signed the First Step Act into law, which allows mostly minimum-security prisoners to earn time off of their sentence and increased time in the community at the end of their sentence. While the BOP has made great strides in implementing the First Step Act, problems persist six years after Trump signed the law, including the need for to calculate credits to reduce sentences as well as finding more community housing (halfway houses) for prisoners. Lastly, Pavlo predicts that the BOP will get little help with facilities repair and its dire shortages in staff – which were frozen by a Trump hiring freeze – and that Trump will likely replace Director Colette Peters, an outsider from the Oregon Department of Corrections, who took over in August 2022.
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