As reported in this post last week, Mark Inch, the director of the federal Bureau of Prisons abruptly resigned on the very day that the White House was having a big event promoting prison reform. Now the New York Times has this big article explaining why under the headline "Turf War Between Kushner and Sessions Drove Federal Prisons Director to Quit." Here are excerpts:
When Jared Kushner hosted a high-profile summit meeting on federal prison reform at the White House last Friday, some in attendance noticed that the man who was ostensibly in charge of the federal prison system, Mark S. Inch, a retired Army major general, was nowhere in sight.
Only Mr. Kushner and a few others knew that Mr. Inch, a genial former military police commander appointed to oversee the Federal Bureau of Prisons and its more than 180,000 inmates just nine months ago, had two days earlier submitted his resignation as the bureau’s director to Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein. By the time President Trump entered the East Room, Mr. Inch had already been ordered to vacate his office and had begun packing up books and memorabilia from his 35-year military career.
Mr. Inch told Mr. Rosenstein he was tired of the administration flouting “departmental norms.” And he complained that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had largely excluded him from major staffing, budget and policy decisions, according to three people with knowledge of the situation. Mr. Inch also felt marginalized by Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, in drafting prison reform legislation, the officials said.
He found himself caught in an ideological turf war between Mr. Kushner and Mr. Sessions. Mr. Kushner has championed reforms to the corrections system and more lenient federal sentencing, and Mr. Sessions, a law-and-order conservative and former Alabama attorney general, has opposed significant parts of the bipartisan prison reform bill that Mr. Kushner backs, according to officials.
Mr. Kushner, with the president’s support, has been pushing prison reform legislation meant to reduce recidivism by incentivizing inmates — with the possibility of early release to halfway houses or home confinement — to take part in job training and other rehabilitation programs. Early in the administration, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Sessions came to an agreement, according to a former administration official involved in their talks. Mr. Kushner would press ahead with prison reforms but avoid a politically divisive issue he cared even more strongly about, sentencing reform, which the attorney general and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, both adamantly oppose.
But Mr. Sessions, not Mr. Kushner, controls the prison bureau. And he has quietly worked to ensure that any reforms that might be seen as excessively lenient toward inmates are put into place only after time-consuming study, according to officials....
But some see Mr. Inch’s exit as an opening for Mr. Trump to take a more sweeping approach that would include sentencing reform — one of the few issues that offer him a chance for the kind of big, bipartisan deal he promised during the 2016 campaign. “The rap against General Inch is that he wasn’t a real reformer. In that sense, his departure is an opportunity,” said Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a Washington-based advocacy organization that is broadly supportive of Mr. Kushner’s reform efforts. “There’s a real struggle going on now about whether or not to reform the bureau, and it was increasingly clear that he wasn’t in a position to reform that agency.”...
Two senior White House officials said Mr. Kushner made a point of inviting Mr. Inch to meetings on the proposed legislation, but Mr. Sessions and his staff often sent other officials in his place. “The attorney general firmly stands behind the principles of prison reform,” said Sarah Isgur Flores, a spokeswoman for Mr. Sessions. “On this specific bill, we have worked closely with the team to offer suggestions that we believe will protect safety and improve rehabilitative outcomes.”...
For now, the Bureau of Prisons will be run by its former assistant director, Hugh J. Hurwitz, a career bureau official. Mr. Sessions was taken by surprise when Mr. Inch resigned and has not begun his search for a permanent successor, according to a Justice Department official.
Even without some form of prison reform legislation passing, the leader of the Bureau of Prisons is in a very important position for any and every federal defendant sentenced to any period of incarceration. Who AG Sessions seeks to install in that role becomes even more important if (and I hope when) some form of federal prison reform gets enacted in the coming months.
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