Could Bureau of Prisons determine election outcome?

OPINION:

Little did I know when I went to federal prison in Miami in defense of our Constitution that I would moonlight as an investigative reporter and uncover a $5 billion waste of taxpayer money.

Three months after my release, neither the Bureau of Prisons nor Congress has done anything about this government failure.

With an Oct. 8 announcement, the bureau has moved in the opposite direction, effectively institutionalizing the $5 billion problem. Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee is doing what it has done for the last two years — nothing but playing political pingpong.

While in prison, I discovered that the Bureau of Prisons has refused to enforce the 2018 First Step Act, which was passed through the leadership and “smart on crime” vision of former President Donald Trump.

The First Step Act, or FSA, is designed to address chronic over-sentencing that arose in the 1990s in response to a crack cocaine crisis and a broader drug epidemic.

In shepherding the FSA through Congress, Mr. Trump understood this “smart on crime” principle: When you keep prisoners behind bars longer than necessary to punish them and deter future crime, you not only get taxpayer waste. You also increase the rate of recidivism, particularly with first-time, nonviolent offenders, and thereby get more crime.

The FSA reduces the time served by inmates through earned credits for good behavior and training. These credits also accelerate inmate placement into either halfway houses or home confinement to ease their transition back into society.

Today, more than five years after the law’s passage, the Bureau of Prisons refuses to fully implement it. As a result, more than 60,000 FSA-eligible inmates will spend from three months to two years longer in prison than the law mandates.

I met many inmates and their families who continue to get the short end of the stick. Del Gowing is in his 80s and should have been released in April 2023. Another, Arman Abovyan, should have been transferred to a halfway house in August.

Others wasting away in prison include Jerome Potter, James Medard, Elliot Smerling, Michael McNew, Brent Borland, Taylor Staats, Jose Gonzalez, Roberto Perez II, Daniel Markovich, Mark Thompson, Junior Jean Baptiste, Weslow Caple, Raymond Ramirez, Joshua Grauer and Ronald Lubetsky.

The cumulative costs of such malign neglect run up to $3 billion for incarcerating more than 60,000 FSA-eligible inmates past their FSA due date. Add $1 billion in indirect costs associated with the foregone tax revenue from keeping inmates in prison who could otherwise be working.

Finally, up to $1 billion in “tax expenditures” provide food stamps, housing subsidies and other forms of welfare to struggling wives and children of inmates deprived of the timely return of their breadwinners.

The root of this $5 billion problem is a prison-industrial complex that profits by keeping as many Americans behind bars as possible. These vested interests include administrators, guards, case managers, unit managers and other staff who work for the government and garner faster promotions and more overtime pay with fuller prisons.

Add to this the private contractors that serve the prison system and the privatized portion of our prison system, and you have a formidable roadblock to FSA implementation. Note that almost 10% of the prison population is held in private facilities, while nearly half the halfway houses and home confinement services, where much of the FSA bottleneck lies, are privatized.

Only Congress can break the iron grip of the prison-industrial complex. It can do so by forcing the Bureau of Prisons into two simple solutions.

First, too many inmates are being held longer because halfway house capacity is lacking. The easy solution that judges have begun to order is to require the bureau to send any inmate to home confinement if there is a lack of halfway house capacity, e.g., Judge Joseph LaPlante in Leavitt v. Warden (2024).

This step — which the House Judiciary Committee could force the Bureau of Prisons to take in one hearing — would result in the immediate release of thousands of nonviolent, first-time offenders into home confinement and thereby save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

Second, the Bureau of Prisons must accurately forecast the release dates using the long-promised but as yet undelivered “maximum conditional FTC calculator.” If the bureau obeyed the FSA law and its own policies, thousands more inmates would see freedom, regain employment and reunite with their families. Bureau of Prisons Director Colette Peters is the biggest criminal in our prison system based on the taxpayer waste she is responsible for.

This is a bipartisan issue. Are you listening, Democratic Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Dick Durbin, and Republican Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah? Can you hear me, Democratic Reps. Hakeem Jeffries of New York and Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, and Republican Reps. James Comer of Kentucky and Jim Jordan of Ohio?

This is also a presidential election issue. Tens of thousands of family members of inmates across the battleground states may well vote for Mr. Trump because he led passage of the FSA.

These swing voters will vote against Kamala Harris because of the Bureau of Prisons’ failure to implement the FSA and because she falsely promised to release nonviolent offenders, particularly those jailed for marijuana-related offenses.

With less than 30 days to go, the issue that could determine the election, particularly if the information in this piece is widely distributed.

• Peter Navarro served in the Trump White House as manufacturing czar and chief China hawk. He is the author of “The New MAGA Deal: The Unofficial Deplorables Guide to Donald Trump’s 2024 Platform.” Follow him at www.peternavarro.substack.com.