Shrinks Do A Runner And Other BOP Headaches – Update for February 3, 2026

We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

ROUGH WEEK FOR THE BOP

Last week began with The Marshall Project reporting that as of last spring, “just one in five federal prisons had a fully staffed psychology department… “[d]ozens of federal prisons nationwide had fewer than half the psychologists needed[and] at more than 10 prisons, there was one psychologist, or none.”

“Those are catastrophic numbers,” retired Bureau of Prisons psychologist Jill Roth, who served as national coordinator for the BOP’s prison rape elimination program until 2021, told TMP.  The report said that the BOP’s psychology program “used to be the envy of other correctional systems, according to psychologists who worked for the agency for decades. ‘BOP was a place psychologists were excited to work,’ Roth said. ‘It has changed.’”

TMP recounted that one BOP psychologist said he left a West Coast prison in May after he was the only staff psychologist for more than 700 people, saying that he feared that the care he could provide under those circumstances did not meet basic professional standards. “At some point it becomes unethical to continue to participate in that,” he was quoted as saying. “Can we provide this group of humans the care they’re entitled to? The answer is no. One person cannot ethically do that.”

The same day, the Dept of Justice Office of Inspector General issued its annual Top Management and Performance Challenges report to Congress, noting that the BOP “continues to face persistent challenges, most critically those presented by staffing shortages, deteriorating infrastructure, and the introduction of contraband. In recent years, deficiencies in the provision of healthcare to inmates and sexual abuse of inmates by BOP staff have emerged as additional significant challenges.”

Writing in Forbes, Walter Pavlo said, “Over the past two decades, the OIG has issued more than 100 reports documenting systemic problems at the BOP, and many of the same deficiencies appear year after year… Staffing shortages, deteriorating facilities, contraband, misconduct, and weak oversight have become familiar themes in the OIG’s annual Top Management and Performance Challenges reports. The latest report reiterates what oversight bodies have said repeatedly: the BOP’s problems are systemic, long-standing, and largely unresolved.”

The Government Accountability Office piled on the next day, reporting that for its study period of March through December 2024, the BOP has been failing in its First Step Act obligation to conduct needs assessments within required time frames, to use uniform methods to record when inmates decline to participate in a recommended program, and to keep program participation data. Most concerning, GAO found that as of the ends of 2024, the BOP had failed to apply all FSA credits to 70% of eligible inmates, and 54% of inmates received no prerelease custody credit for their earned FSA time.

GAO found that BOP generally applied all time credits toward supervised release but not for prerelease custody.

The report noted that BOP had implemented new planning tools in 2024 and 2025 to help staff anticipate upcoming transfers to prerelease custody and ensure incarcerated people receive their FSA time credits, and that GAO is currently examining BOP’s efforts to forecast capacity needs and provide sufficient halfway house and home confinement resources.

The Dept of Justice was required to issue annual FSA reports to Congress for five years after the Act passed. The last one was issued in June 2024. GAO recommended that Congress amend the law to require continued reports, because “without such information, Congress may be hindered in its decision making regarding the FSA.”

The Marshall Project, Amid ‘Catastrophic’ Shortage, Psychologists Flee Federal Prisons in Droves (January 26, 2026)

DOJ Inspector General, Top Management and Performance Challenges Facing the Department of Justice | 2025 (January 26, 2026) 

Forbes, The Bureau Of Prisons: When OIG Warnings Meet GAO Reality (January 28, 2026)

GAO, Federal Prisons: Improvements Needed to the System Used to Assess and Mitigate Incarcerated People’s Recidivism Risk, GAO-26-107268 (January 27, 2026)

~ Thomas L. Root