Union and prisons director clash on funding

A federal employee union official and the head of the Bureau of Prisons agreed that understaffing is a problem in testimony before House lawmakers on Tuesday, but painted conflicting portraits of how the agency is addressing it.

"Our No. 1 priority in the Bureau of Prisons is to increase our staff who supervise inmates," Director Harley Lappin told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security. "We have not had the available funding to fill as many positions that we'd like to fill.…Over time, with increased medical costs, with increased salary and benefit costs, with increased costs associated with facilities cost, [other items] have absorbed our budget."

He noted the number of inmates per prison guard has climbed from 3.6 in 1997 to 4.9 in 2009. This has contributed to growth in prison violence, Lappin said. Phil Glover, legislative coordinator for the American Federation of Government Employees' Council of Prison Locals, cited a bureau report that found between fiscal 2005 and 2006, the number of inmate-inmate attacks increased 15.5 percent, and inmate-staff attacks rose 6 percent.

Lappin told lawmakers the bureau is working on beefing up its staffing, and said he would provide Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., a summary of ongoing efforts. He added that he hoped future budgets would allow the bureau to hire 3,000 more employees, including corrections officers.

But in written testimony, Glover criticized Lappin for failing to take advantage of funding already available. He said "informed sources" told AFGE that the bureau intended to use $70.6 million set aside in President Obama's 2010 budget to hire 742 correctional officers "to help rebuild various BoP operational activities (inmate care programs and prison facility maintenance and security functions)."

Glover also said in his written testimony that Lappin rejected a recommendation from the House Appropriations Committee that the bureau use extra funds in the fiscal 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act to hire more corrections officers. Instead, Glover said, Lappin planned to spend that money on the 2009 federal employee pay raise; inmate care costs that were higher than budgeted; new education and drug treatment staff; and the National Institute of Corrections, a think tank and training center for state and federal corrections agencies.

Traci Billingsley, chief public information officer for the Bureau of Prisons, said it was true that the pay raise had consumed $111 million of the $257 million funding increase that the bureau received in fiscal 2009, and the bureau was coping with rising costs in other areas, including medical care and utilities. The bureau also opened a new medium-security prison in Louisiana in fiscal 2009, she said.

But Billingsley said the union's characterization of the bureau as spending no funds on staffing was inaccurate. The bureau has a net increase of 405 staff so far this year, she said, and during the third and fourth quarters of 2009, the size of the corrections departments at federal prisons and the federal Supermax facility is set to increase by 2 percent.