The Marshall Project has this lengthy new piece reporting on an old story, namely the utter failure of federal prison officials to discharge effectively their "compassionate release" responsibilities by helping to identify prisoners who ought to have their prison sentences reduced due to serious illness or other compelling factors. The full piece is worth a full read; it is fully headlined: "Thousands of Sick Federal Prisoners Sought Compassionate Release. 98 Percent Were Denied. Wardens blocked bids for freedom as COVID-19 spread behind bars, data shows." Here are a few excerpts, with commentary to follow:
Data recently obtained by The Marshall Project underscores what attorneys, advocates and experts have long suspected: As the pandemic ramped up, federal prison wardens denied or ignored more than 98 percent of compassionate release requests, including many from medically vulnerable prisoners like Neba. Wardens are the first line of review; ultimately, compassionate release petitions must be approved by a judge. Though the Bureau of Prisons has previously posted information about the number of people let out on compassionate release, it wasn’t clear until now just how many prisoners applied for it or how frequently wardens denied these requests despite widespread calls to reduce the prison population in the face of the pandemic....
Of the 10,940 federal prisoners who applied for compassionate release from March through May, wardens approved 156. Some wardens, including those at Seagoville in Texas and Oakdale in Louisiana, did not respond to any request in that time frame, according to the data, while others responded only to deny them all. Higher-ups in Washington, D.C., reviewed 84 of the warden approvals and overturned all but 11. Time and again, the only way prisoners were able to win compassionate release was to take the bureau to court to fight the wardens' denials.
For dozens of people stuck behind bars, the virus has proved fatal; so far, 134 federal prisoners have died of COVID-19, and more than 15,800 have fallen ill. A statement from the Bureau of Prisons did not address specific questions, including why some wardens failed to respond to release requests. The wardens referred questions to the bureau.
At Elkton, an early hot spot in Ohio where nine prisoners died of COVID-19 and more than 900 got sick beginning in March, the warden denied 866 out of 867 requests for compassionate release between March 1 and May 31.
In California, the prison at Terminal Island became the site of a major outbreak, with 694 prisoners testing positive by the end of May. But the warden only approved five of the 256 compassionate release requests filed by that time. At Butner, a four-prison complex in North Carolina where 25 prisoners and one correctional officer died in May and June, officials approved 29 of 524 requests by the end of May.
At some prisons, the low number of requests raised questions about the bureau’s recordkeeping. For example, at the Oakdale complex, an early hot spot in Louisiana where eight prisoners have died, officials reported just 95 compassionate release applications by the end of May out of a population of more than 1,700. The warden took action on none of them. At the same time, the prison racked up 191 positive cases. Likewise at Forrest City, a two-prison complex in Arkansas where more than 700 men fell ill, officials reported only three applications by the end of May. All three were approved.
For more than a dozen institutions, including all 11 of the privately run federal prisons, the bureau listed no compassionate release requests at all. “The numbers seem incorrect,” said Somil Trivedi, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, who has helped coordinate lawsuits against federal prisons. “I just don’t feel like they’re counting them all. This has to be an undercount because of the informal nature of the process.”
I am very pleased to see the Marshall Project seek to marshal this data, and I would have been shocked if the data showed anything else about how federal prison officials responded to compassionate release requests. Congress through the FIRST STEP Act wisely altered the process for these requests to authorize prisoners to directly motion courts for a sentence reduction (often called "compassionate release") because federal prison officials had so badly failed for decades to effectively discharge their "compassionate release" responsibilities. In the past, many hundreds of inmates had died before prison officials would even respond to requests, and Congress should be widely praises for its wise decision to now allow prisoners to motion courts directly after first making the request to prison officials.
That said, the challenges of collecting these data and keeping them updated serves as a reminder that the FIRST STEP Act did not fix everything. As long known by those involved in this system, the federal BOP still needs to be subject to considerably more independent oversight and reporting requirements. BOP's overall lack of accountability and transparency was bad enough in normal times, especially since the BOP has been the nation's largest incarcerator for the better part of two decades. In the COVID era, the federal prisons bureau should be doing a whole lot better and that really seem to now require significant structural change.
That all said, any doom and gloom about federal prison officials can and should be tempered by the broader success stories in the arena of sentence reductions (often called "compassionate release") under 3582(c), and this overall success is usefully documented in real time by the BOP. Though the BOP does not discuss motions denied of any particulars, the BOP does helpfully report at this FSA page the total number of granted post-FIRST STEP Act "Compassionate Releases / Reduction in Sentences." As of this writing, that number stands at 1752 (and is up over 250 in just the last month since I blogged on this topic here).
As detailed in this post, the US Sentencing Commission has reported that in the year before FIRST STEP only 24 persons got their sentenced reduced; in the year after FIRST STEP became law, that number of sentence reductions rose to 145. Doing the math, this all means that in the COVID era there have already been over 1600 sentence reduction motions granted (meaning roughly 80 times as many as pre-FIRST STEP and 11 times as many as post FIRST STEP/Pre-COVID)!
A few of many prior related posts:
- Making the case for independent oversight of the federal Bureau of Prisons
- Ugly details from federal defenders' latest fact sheet on COVID-19 and federal detention
- Effective review of messiness of federal compassionate releases amidst COVID
- Spotlighting remarkable (but still cursory) data on "compassionate release" after FIRST STEP Act
- Second Circuit panel rules unanimously that district courts have broad discretion to consider "any extraordinary and compelling reason for release that a defendant might raise"
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