President Joe Biden’s, Federal Bureau of Prisons, failures to correctly implement The First Step Act (passed in December of 2018), are costing the taxpayers billions of dollars, says former Trump Aide Peter Navarro from FPC Miami.
Back on March 20, 2024, former White House Aide and Economist Peter Navarro, reported to FPC Miami to begin his 4 month Federal Prison Sentence. After a litany of motions to try and get out of that 4 months sentence he has buckled down and started listening to his fellow inmates.
Navarro was alarmed to hear first hand accounts of how the BOP has completely botched up the implementation of the First Step Act. Starting with it’s signing back on December 21, 2018. Now typically when a law is signed by the President it gets implemented in a fast, orderly fashion, not so for the most significant piece of prison reform in over 2 decades. And this seems to be par for the course for “tough on crime” Joe Biden.
The First Step Act allows eligible Federal Inmates to earn “earned time credits” that are redeemable for up to a year off of their sentence, provided they have a term of supervised release to follow their in prison sentence. The credits are earned for participating in Evidence Based Recidivism Reducing courses (EBRR) and other Productive Activities.
The legislation, quarterbacked by Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner, basically provides for inmates that are optimizing their prison time for rehabilitative efforts, the opportunity to earn their way out of prison quicker, even after the 15% inmates get off their sentences for good conduct.
The way it’s supposed to work is that inmates with a low or minimu recidivism score (called PATTERN score) earn, and can redeem, 15 days per 30 days of participation. While inmates with medium and high PATTERN scores earn 10 days per 30 days of participation, but cannot redeem those credits until they reach a low or minimum score. Even then, they must wait 2 evaluation periods before the additional days kick in. Those periods, are periods between “teams’. For those with more than 18 months left in their prison sentence, team happens once every 6 months. For those with less than 18 months (to the door), have team every 90 days.
Seems easy enough, right? Wrong. At institutions across the country, case management teams are having problems following the procedures laid out in the unambiguous First Step Act legislation. Navarro, who wrote an op-ed for the Daily Caller, came in face to face contact with inmates who were 4, 6 and even 12 months behind in their credit calculations.
Many inmates have been clogging up the Federal Court system, even after exhausting Administrative remedies, just to get a judge to rule on their First Step Act credits. In many cases, after a lawsuit is filed, the BOP quickly rectifies the situation.
In the Daily Caller, Navarro writes:
Here’s the Bureau of Prison’s problem: Instead of projecting inmate FTCs as its own 2022 Program Statement requires, the BOP continues to rely on an antiquated “earn as you go” algorithm that vastly undercounts inmate FTCs. As a result, virtually every one of the more than 60,000 First Step Act eligible inmates will suffer from pre-release and release delays that range from three months to twelve months or more, depending on the length of the sentence.
The Daily Caller
The facts are pretty clear, and well known, it costs much more to house an inmate in a Federal Prison Institution, versus a halfway house, and of course Home Confinement. This equates to billions of tax payer dollars being flushed down the toilet.
Source: The Daily Caller
