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A hundred days into his tenure as Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), Josh Smith delivered a speech that struck a familiar chord, a promise to restore transparency and accountability to an agency he called “in shambles.” Speaking candidly about staffing shortfalls, decaying infrastructure, and the mismanagement of federal prison reform programs, Smith positioned himself and BOP Director William Marshall III as reformers empowered by President Donald Trump to fix decades of dysfunction.
It is not the first time an executive at BOP’s Central Office spoke out about past problems with a new solution. The BOP has experienced unprecedented turnover at the top position where there have been 8 directors or acting directors since 2016. To put that in perspective, there were only 7 directors since the BOP’s founding in 1930 until 2016. Further complicating matters, new presidential administrations have had differing views on the agency’s mission.
The Bureau of Prisons was created in 1930 to bring professional management to what had been a loose network of federal jails. For nearly a century, it has grown into a $8.3 billion dollar per year agency managing more than 150,000 inmates and 36,000 employees. Its mission to safely confine, rehabilitate, and prepare people for reentry has repeatedly collided with the political, fiscal, and moral contradictions of American corrections.
Staffing shortages are among the oldest of these problems. Since 1998 Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report warned that “chronic understaffing endangers both employees and inmates.” Some 25 years later, staffing is still a problem and the OIG now maintains a compendium of reports it has on numerous BOP challenges and failures.
The situation in BOP deteriorated during and after the COVID-19 pandemic when attrition and burnout reached record levels. A 2023 OIG audit noted that “augmentation,” the practice of forcing teachers, nurses, and administrators to work as guards, had become the norm rather than the exception. Such actions have led to failures in implementing the First Step Act. Morale plummeted, and the BOP was ranked near the bottom among large federal agencies in the 2022 and 2023 Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys. Now the BOP is seeing an exodus to other government agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) where bonuses and higher salaries are attracting corrections officers looking for new opportunities.
Smith’s commented on the $4 billion maintenance backlog for institutions. GAO Report GAO-21-123 (2021) identified a $2.1 billion backlog at that time, warning that deferred repairs posed “serious risks to safety and security.” Many BOP facilities date back to the 1930s and 1940s, relics of the New Deal’s prison construction boom. The Big Beautiful Bill provides billions to upgrade institutions that have fallen into disrepair.
Roof leaks, broken locks, and failing plumbing are common, but so are antiquated IT systems. While Smith’s jab about “1950s mainframes” might seem like an exaggeration, he is right that the BOP still relies on legacy systems built before the internet era. In 2020, the OIG described the Bureau’s technology infrastructure as “fragmented, outdated, and insecure.” This hinders everything from inmate tracking to staff scheduling to the implementation of the First Step Act.
Contraband also reflects the gap between modern threats and obsolete defenses. Drones, corrupted mail, and smuggled cellphones have transformed prison contraband into a technological arms race. In 2023, the National Institute of Justicereleased a report on the ongoing concern of drone related contraband incidents. The Bureau’s limited ability to counter such threats, due in part to slow procurement and outdated detection systems, directly compromises safety.
Smith’s speech touches, albeit briefly, on the emotional toll within the Bureau. Suicides among staff and inmates have risen in recent years, reflecting the broader crisis in correctional mental health. The OIG’s 2024 report on suicides in federal prison identified several operational and managerial deficiencies that created unsafe conditions prior to and at the time of a number of these deaths.
Compounding this are longstanding problems of misconduct and low trust. The Government Accountability Office found in one study that BOP increased staff and took other steps to reduce its employee misconduct caseload, but about “37 percent of the 12,153 cases open as of February 2025 had been unresolved for 3 years or longer.” Smith’s call to “expose the truth and hold those responsible accountable” reflects the mission to identify staff problems and remove them.
The First Step Act of 2018, passed with rare bipartisan support, was intended to be a turning point, expanding rehabilitation, creating earned time credits, and reducing recidivism. Yet implementation has been troubled.
Over the past three years, I have written about persistent errors in the time credit system, delays in program approval, and lack of transparency about funding. Smith blames “Biden’s DOJ and BOP” for mismanagement, but the problems predate the Biden administration.
In many ways, the First Step Act replayed the fate of earlier initiatives such as the Second Chance Act of 2008 and the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, reforms that were well intentioned but underfunded and inconsistently enforced. Each promised transformation and each stumbled against bureaucratic inertia and a culture that is reluctant to change.
Smith’s criticism of “vitriolic” union leaders taps into a decades-long tension between management and labor within the Bureau. The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents most BOP staff, has often clashed with leadership over working conditions, mandatory overtime, and safety policies, all legitimate areas of concern.
During previous administrations, unions resisted privatization efforts and staffing reassignments. Their defenders argue that unions are the only safeguard for officers in a dangerous, thankless environment, but critics counter that union resistance sometimes slows reform and protects underperforming managers.
The reality is more complex. The BOP’s culture has long prized insularity and hierarchy. Decisions flow from Washington, while local wardens exercise their own institutional discretion. Political appointees come and go, while career administrators keep the system functioning, or, as Smith suggests, stagnating.
Smith’s proposed solution, the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a $5 billion investment to restore staffing, modernize facilities, and retrain employees, carries echoes of previous reform packages. The 1994 Federal Workforce Restructuring Act and the 2018 Trump administration’s budget request both pledged similar renewals, yet few achieved lasting change.
Funding can repair roofs and buy scanners, but it cannot repair trust or culture. The OIG and GAO have repeatedly concluded that “BOP leadership’s inability to effectively address challenges,” rather than money alone, is the core obstacle.
Still, Smith’s plan to hire additional staff and new correctional officers would, if realized, reverse years of attrition. His emphasis on training, once dismissed as nonessential, acknowledges a truth often lost in politics, that safety and professionalism depend on preparation, not just paychecks.
The BOP’s role in public safety is enormous. As Smith reminds us, 97 percent of federal inmates will eventually return to the community. Yet rehabilitation remains chronically underfunded and inconsistently delivered. The BOP’s Reentry Services Division lost over 90 positions during the pandemic Smith noted, and halfway house capacity has barely expanded in years. This in an era where the First Step Act was meant to move thousands of inmates back into the community to serve a portion of their sentence.
This contradiction, between punishment and preparation, lies at the heart of the BOP’s struggle. Administrations from both parties have oscillated between tough-on-crime rhetoric and reformist ambition. The result is an agency pulled in two directions, expected to be both a fortress and a schoolhouse, both punitive and redemptive. It is not an easy task.
Every few years, the BOP reaches a crossroads. A new director or deputy pledges reform, promises transparency, and denounces the failures of the past. Yet systemic change remains elusive because the BOP is not merely a bureaucratic entity. It is a microcosm of America’s broader criminal justice contradictions.
To make the BOP “great again,” as Smith puts it, will require more than money and management reshuffles. It will require redefining what success looks like in corrections, fewer lockdowns, safer staff, meaningful rehabilitation, and genuine oversight. It will also demand political courage to acknowledge that decades of neglect cannot be undone by a single bill or administration.
Josh Smith’s speech offers a blunt diagnosis and an ambitious goals. His words resonate because they reflect real frustration from officers forced into double shifts to inmates languishing without programs. But history urges caution. The Bureau of Prisons has heard such pledges before, from both Republican and Democratic appointees.
The difference this time may lie in whether Smith and his colleagues confront not just the “mess” of prior years, but the deeper culture of secrecy, complacency, and political volatility that has defined the BOP for generations.
There is a lot at stake. If it succeeds, the impact will ripple far beyond prison walls, reshaping the lives of the thousands who work within them and the tens of thousands who will one day leave them behind.
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