Of the nearly 160,000 prisoners in federal custody in the United States, 24,000 of them are housed in minimum security facilities.
Most of those facilities do not even have any fencing around them, have fewer staff to monitor the prisoners and routinely allow prisoners to go unsupervised into the community for work details. Minimum security camps house those who have less than 10 years remaining in their sentence, many far fewer, and their populations are prisoners that are serving time for crimes that were not violent (low level drug dealers and white collar offenders).
Yet the average cost to house a prisoner in a minimum security facility, at $151.02, is not much lower than the cost of housing someone in a maximum security prison. And since there are more minimum security prisoners than high, the total costs of housing minimum security prisoners far exceeds the costs of housing those in high security.
In an opinion piece for Forbes, Walter Pavlo, the founder of Prisonology, an expert network firm of retired BOP professionals, argues that moving prisoners to halfway houses or home confinement from minimum security institutions is a cost effective way to reduce costs at a time when BOP is under tremendous pressure due to shortages of staffing, poor morale and crumbling infrastructure.
The BOP has the authority to move more people to community facilities but lacks the capacity or will to do so.
First Step Act, signed in December 2018 by President Donald Trump, allows the BOP to reduce sentences of prisoners by up to a year for participation in programming and productive activities. In addition, prisoners can also earn time toward home confinement. However, the BOP’s troubles in implementing the First Step Act have left many minimum security prisoners who could be on home confinement or a halfway house in prison. Almost six years since becoming law, the BOP’s annual report on the First Step Act for 2024 stated “... As was the case in the last Report, it is too soon to assess cost savings resulting from the implementation of the FSA.”
The reasons given for not having cost savings were attributed to certain fixed costs necessary to operate institutions, such as food and medical contracts.
The cost of halfway house placement is still high at $126.17/day. Halfway houses provide beds for some prisoners and home confinement supervision for others. However, halfway house placement represents a 20% cost savings over institutional living.
The numbers indicate that moving prisoners to halfway houses from institutions is a cost effective way to reduce costs. The passage of the First Step Act was meant to address this very issue but has yet to realize the cost savings which was the centerpiece of the legislation.
In the 2024 budget, the BOP admitted that the increased use of “these reform tools could reduce population estimates and result in projected savings for the BOP.” If only it would act.
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