Is the number of federal prisoners about to spike up as BOP moves nearly 7000 new inmates into federal facilities?
The question in the title of this post is my reaction to this new BOP press release titled "Bureau of Prisons Announces Update on Inmate Movement." The press release is dated May 22, and it starts this way:
The Bureau of Prisons (Bureau) and the United States Marshals Service (USMS) announced today that they will begin movement of approximately 6,800 new inmates who have been committed to the Bureau in recent months.
The Bureau, in coordination with the USMS, has decreased internal movement of inmates by 90% as compared to this time last year. While inmate movement was significantly curtailed for several months, newly sentenced and newly admitted inmates have been held in local detention facilities across the country. As the federal judiciary has continued to process new criminal cases and begins to phase-in expanded operations, the Bureau must, on a limited basis, move these inmates to alleviate population pressures in these local detention centers and allow inmates to begin serving their sentences.
This AP article provides addition background, including these details and context:
The inmates will be sent to one of three designated quarantine sites — FCC Yazoo City in Mississippi, FCC Victorville in California and FTC Oklahoma City — or to a Bureau of Prisons detention center. All the inmates who are being moved will be tested for COVID-19 when they arrive at the Bureau of Prisons facility and would be tested again before they are moved to the prison where they would serve their sentence.
The prisoners have already been sentenced to federal crimes but were unable to be moved from local facilities as the coronavirus pandemic struck over concerns the virus would spread rampantly.... The federal prison system is continuing coronavirus-related restrictions, including a ban on visitors and minimal inmate transfers, at least through the end of June.
Regular readers know I have been tracking and wondering about the historic declines in the federal prison population in the last few months that the BOP has been reporting through its usual BOP weekly "Total Federal Inmates" population counts. Specifically, as noted here, on April 9, the BOP reported population has already gone down to 173,686 inmates; six weeks later, as noted here, the BOP reported population was down to 166,647. Notably, that reported difference in the BOP population represent almost exactly a 7000 inmate decline, which seemingly matches up pretty closely with the 6,800 new inmates being held in local detention facilities that are now to be moved into federal facilities. In other words, it seems possible that what I thought might be an historic COVID decline is really largely just an artifice of 6,800 federal prisoners not being officially counted while being held in local detention facilities.
Because I find BOP accounting opaque in many ways, I am not sure whether we should now expect to see a huge spike in the official BOP inmate count this week, nor am I sure there is any single predictable accounting metric for just how and why BOP inmate counts will fluctuate either in normal times or in these crazy COVID times. But these stories provide further confirmation that the massive federal prison system has an extraordinary inflow and outflow of humans in all times. It is dangerously easy to look at the federal prison population as relatively stable in some periods without realize that many, many thousands of persons move in and out of this system of human caging every year.
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