“Federal elected officials have been concerned about issues of harassment, discrimination, retaliation and sexual assault at the Bureau of Prisons,” said Sandy Chung, executive director of the ACLU of Oregon. “It’s not a reform situation - it’s a stabilize-a-very-broken-system situation.”Īnd even though Justice Department officials touted Peters as a “visionary leader” with an eye toward rehabilitation when they announced her appointment, critics have raised questions about whether she’s really lived up to her ideals in Oregon. “You can’t reform something that broken,” John Wetzel, who adopted some Norwegian practices while running Pennsylvania’s prisons for a decade, told The Marshall Project. ![]() Under former Bureau of Prisons director Michael Carvajal, the agency came under scrutiny for a growing number of escapes and suicides, as well as problems stemming from short-staffing, a slew of employee arrests, persistent sex abuse scandals and poor handling of the pandemic. Given the state of the federal prison system, experts are skeptical. In picking Peters to run the Bureau of Prisons, the Biden administration has brought local and state debates to a national stage: Can this new generation of prison leaders, who use words like “dignity” and “humanity,” actually make lives better for the men and women under their control? It’s to make good neighbors.”īut American prisons are still a long way from Europe’s, and even the most innovative corrections leaders here have overseen horrific living conditions in their prisons and abuse from their staff. “We know so much more about what works in corrections than we did 10 years ago,” Peters said at her swearing-in ceremony on Tuesday. During her 10 years at the helm of the state corrections department, Peters burnished a reputation as a reformer, vowing to reduce the use of solitary confinement and of the potentially stigmatizing word “inmate.” Like her counterparts in California and North Dakota, she made headlines by visiting Norway in the hope of bringing a gentler model of incarceration back to the United States. The final pick - Oregon prison director Colette Peters - seemed to fit the bill. When the embattled head of the federal Bureau of Prisons stepped down earlier this year, many hoped his replacement would be someone able to overhaul the scandal-plagued federal system. ![]() Sign up for our newsletters to receive all of our stories and analysis. ![]() The Marshall Project is a nonprofit newsroom covering the U.S.
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