The Department of Justice inspector general (OIG) warned on Monday that medical staffing is at “crisis levels” at more than ten percent of federal prisons.
The comptroller cited an assessment made by a former Bureau of Prison (BOP) executive, noting that 12 out of 97 of the bureau’s correctional facilities have been “medically staffed at only 71 percent or below,” since September 2014.
It also reported that in the same time frame, seventy-three BOP jails were understaffed against department policy, which dictates “the vacancy rate shall not exceed 10 percent during any 18-month period.” Only 24 federal correctional institutions had a medical staffing rate of 90 percent or higher.
Across the federal penitentiary system, BOP is short hundreds of medical staffers. Since September 2014, it has declined to fill 656 healthcare job openings, the OIG found. The bureau’s 3,871 planned medical positions are supposed to service over 171,800 inmates.
The inspector general warned that this situation could fuel militant uprisings, as medical shortages have done in the recent past. The report published Monday cited a 2009 riot at the Reeves County Detention Center, which was the subject of an OIG investigation published last year.
“[W]hile low medical staffing levels alone were not the direct cause of the disturbance, they affected security and health services functions,” the OIG stated this week.
In an article on the OIG’s investigation of the Reeves riot, Al-Jazeera noted the 2009 incident was “one of two that occurred after an inmate died of an epileptic seizure while placed in solitary confinement.”
Al-Jazeera also noted that Reeves was operated by a for-profit prison contractor called The GEO Group. In 2007, the corporate jailors won the rights to manage Reeves for a decade. The $493 million contract was the second largest in Justice Department history.
