Return to the USDOJ/OIG Home Page
Return to the Table of Contents

The Federal Bureau of Prisons Inmate Release Preparation and Transitional Reentry Programs

Report No. 04-16
March 2004
Office of the Inspector General


Executive Summary

The Federal Bureau of Prisons' (BOP) stated mission is to protect society by confining offenders in the controlled environments of prisons and community?based facilities that are safe, humane, cost-efficient, appropriately secure, and that provide work and other self?improvement opportunities to assist offenders in becoming law?abiding citizens. It is a strategic objective of the BOP to "provide productive work, education, occupational training, and recreational activities which prepare inmates for employment opportunities and a successful reintegration upon release, and which have a clear correctional management purpose which minimizes inmate idleness."1

During Fiscal Year (FY) 2000 through FY 2002, the BOP reported that 74,401 federal prison inmates were released from its institutions. It is expected that a large percentage of inmates released will recidivate. Based on the most recent statistics available on federal inmates from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), approximately 16 percent of federal inmates released will return to federal prisons within 3 years.2 Further, according to the most recent study conducted by the BOP on recidivism rates for federal inmates, about 41 percent of federal inmates released to the community in 1987 were rearrested or had their parole revoked within 3 years of release.3

According to the DOJ Strategic Plan, since a majority of inmates will be released at some point, it is important for the DOJ to provide them the means to increase their chances for successful reentry into society. The Strategic Plan states that the BOP has a responsibility to offer program opportunities to inmates that provide the skills necessary for successful reentry into society. Therefore, in addition to the basic services (such as clothing, food, and access to health care), the BOP provides inmates with a variety of educational, vocational, recreational, religious, and psychological programs. The BOP's inmate programs are geared, ultimately, toward preparing inmates for eventual release.

In addition to programs offered during incarceration designed to prepare inmates for reentry into society (reentry programs), the BOP requires that all eligible inmates receive transitional reentry services through placement in Community Corrections Centers (CCC), also referred to as halfway houses, prior to release. This placement is intended to help inmates adjust to life in the community and find suitable post-release employment.4

The DOJ Office of the Inspector General (OIG) conducted this audit to evaluate whether the BOP ensures that federal inmates participate in its programs designed to prepare them for successful reentry into society. The objectives of our audit were to determine whether the BOP ensures that:

  • each of the BOP's institutions maximize the number of inmates that complete programs designed to prepare them for reentry into society, including occupational, educational, psychological, and other programs; and
  • all eligible inmates are provided the opportunity to transition through a CCC in preparation for reentry into society.

Background

The DOJ is responsible for the detention and incarceration of persons charged with violating federal statutes. The DOJ defines detention as the temporary confinement of individuals and incarceration as the imprisonment of individuals convicted and sentenced for federal crimes. The U.S. Marshals Service and the BOP share the DOJ's detention responsibilities; the incarceration of federal inmates is the sole responsibility of the BOP.

As of November 2003, the BOP consisted of 103 institutions, 6 regional offices, a central office, 2 staff training centers, and 28 community corrections offices. The BOP is currently responsible for the custody and care of approximately 174,000 federal offenders.

In conducting the audit, we interviewed officials from the BOP Central Office and 3 of the 6 BOP regional offices. We conducted fieldwork or obtained information through questionnaires from 27 institutions. Additionally, we examined reported data for 82 institutions, including the Administrative Maximum Security (ADX) institution, and all Federal Correctional Institutions (FCI), Federal Prison Camps (FPC), and United States Penitentiaries (USP). We excluded Federal Detention Centers (FDC), Federal Medical Centers (FMC), Federal Transfer Centers (FTC), Metropolitan Correctional Centers (MCC), Medical Centers for Federal Prisoners (MCFP), and Metropolitan Detention Centers (MDC) because of the unique missions of these institutions.

Additional information related to our audit objectives, scope, and methodology appears in Appendix III of this report.

Summary of Audit Findings

Research conducted by both governmental and private institutions concludes that successful completion of occupational, educational, psychological, and other programs during an inmate's incarceration leads to both a reduction in recidivism and an increase in post-release employment opportunities. Research in this area also concludes that inmates who transition into the community through a CCC are less likely to recidivate. Therefore, our audit focused on whether the BOP ensures that federal inmates receive the maximum benefit from its programs designed to prepare them for successful reentry into society. Overall, our audit concluded that each BOP institution offers similar types of reentry programs that are generally recognized to reduce recidivism. However, we found that the BOP does not provide assurance that its institutions are maximizing the number of inmates that complete these programs and that all eligible inmates are provided the opportunity to transition through a CCC to help prepare them for reentry into society.

Reentry Program Completions

We reviewed the types of reentry programs offered by the BOP to prepare inmates for successful reentry into society and found that each of the 82 BOP institutions included in our audit offer a full range of occupational, educational, psychological, and other programs that, based on studies, are shown to be effective in helping inmates successfully reenter society. We found that:

  • According to BOP officials, the BOP has been working to establish an effective strategic management process for monitoring and evaluating goals and outcomes since 1998 through various initiatives, such as developing program guidelines, directing regions to establish educational goals, and implementing quarterly performance reports. However, the BOP has not yet implemented a standardized process followed by all institutions to establish realistic occupational and educational completion goals. We found that institutions with similar security levels and populations had set very different goals. Further, the program completion goals are stated as the number of completions rather than a percentage of completions. This does not accurately reflect program performance because it does not take into account the effect of the number of enrollments or the total inmate population that could participate in programs, which would allow the BOP to compare performance among its institutions.
  • During FY 1999 through FY 2002, 31 to 69 percent of institutions we looked at failed to meet their occupational, General Educational Development (GED), English?as-a-Second Language (ESL), Adult Continuing Education (ACE), or parenting goals. Despite this failure rate, the BOP did not have a mechanism in place to hold institutions accountable for meeting goals. In addition, institutions were not required to develop or implement corrective actions plans to remedy performance and ensure that goals are met in the future.
  • The BOP did not routinely review program performance at each of its institutions, despite the fact that there was a wide range in the percentage of inmates successfully completing occupational and GED programs at institutions of the same security level.
  • We were unable to analyze trends related to psychological program performance (e.g. completions rates, failure rates, and withdrawal rates) because the BOP only began reporting this data for most of its psychological programs starting in January 2003. Although the BOP has only recently begun reporting monthly participation data, we found that the BOP did not have a standardized process in place among its regions for reviewing program participation at each of its institutions to ensure that institutions maximize program participation.
  • One of the expected outcomes of the BOP's Release Preparation Program (RPP), which started in 1996, is that inmate recidivism would be reduced. However, to date the BOP has not conducted any follow?up studies demonstrating that successful participation in its RPP leads to a reduction in recidivism. The BOP also does not track the percentage of inmates that successfully complete the RPP at each of its institutions prior to release.

Community Corrections Centers (CCC)

In addition to reentry programs offered at its institutions, the BOP provides services that assist inmates in transitioning from incarceration into the community. The primary transitional service provided by the BOP is the placement of inmates in CCCs, also known as halfway houses. Prior studies conducted by the BOP have found that CCC placement prior to release increases the chances of an inmate's successful reentry into society. The BOP's strategic plan establishes annual CCC utilization targets for its minimum, low, and medium security institutions.5 Our audit revealed that the BOP does not assure that all eligible inmates are being transitioned through a CCC. Specifically, we found that:

  • The BOP has not established a CCC utilization target for its high security institutions. In our judgment, inmates in high security institutions have the greatest need for transitioning through the controlled CCC environment prior to being released directly into the community.
  • According to BOP officials, at each quarterly executive staff meeting CCC utilization rates are reviewed and the regional directors may be required to comment on any utilization rate outliers (institutions with CCC utilization rates that are significantly lower that the target utilization rate). Only one specific security level (minimum, low, medium or high) is addressed at each quarterly meeting. However, we found that during FY 2000 through FY 2002, between 28 and 54 percent of institutions we looked at failed to meet their CCC utilization targets.
  • We also found that the CCC utilization targets cannot be used to determine whether all eligible inmates at each institution were released to the community through a CCC, as required by BOP policy. Currently, the CCC utilization targets range from 65 percent for medium security level institutions to 80 percent for minimum security level institutions; therefore, even if an institution achieves or exceeds the CCC utilization target for its security level, the BOP can not assure that all eligible inmates were transitioned through a CCC.

Recommendations

We make thirteen recommendations that focus on specific steps that the BOP should take to maximize the number of inmates that complete its programs designed to prepare inmates for successful reentry into society and to ensure that eligible inmates are transitioned into society through a CCC. Our recommendations include:

  • establishing realistic occupational and educational completion goals stated as a percentage of enrollments, and ensuring that institutions are held accountable for meeting occupational and educational goals and outcomes on an annual basis;
  • evaluating the performance factors for occupational programs to ensure that institutions are held accountable for low performance;
  • developing a suitable measure of literacy program performance and evaluating the percentage of citizen inmates required to participate in the literacy program who have dropped out;
  • evaluating participation data for psychological programs and tracking RPP participation to ensure that institutions are held accountable for low performance;
  • screening inmates prior to enrollment in occupational programs to ensure that they have the ability and are willing to commit to completing the course; and
  • establishing a CCC utilization target for high security institutions and developing a CCC utilization monitoring process that ensures that all eligible inmates are transitioned through a CCC as required by BOP policy.

Footnotes
  1. The BOP, State of the Bureau 2002, Accomplishments and Goals.
  2. The DOJ BJS, Special Report, Offenders Returning to Federal Prisons, 1986-97, dated September 2000.
  3. The BOP, Recidivism Among Federal Prisoners Released in 1987, dated August 4, 1994.
  4. As of October 2003, the BOP had 6,451 inmates placed in CCCs.
  5. The CCC utilization rate is equal to the number of inmates placed in a CCC prior to release divided by (the total number of inmates placed in a CCC plus total number of inmates released directly into the community). The CCC utilization rate measures the percentage of inmates that transition into the community through the controlled CCC environment as compared to those inmates released directly into the community.