An internal audit of a single private prison caused the US Marshals Service to admit that it wasn’t properly overseeing its for-profit detention facilities.
The law enforcement agency said that it would establish onsite monitoring at each one of the fifteen contracted prisons under its purview, when pressed last year by the Justice Department Office of Inspector General.
The inspector general’s final report, which was released on Tuesday, had been launched to probe a facility in Leavenworth, Kansas, run by CoreCivic, Inc.
Internal auditors had warned the agency about monitoring deficiencies—both in Leavenworth and throughout the system–in a February 2016 memo. They said that Marshals Service practices were not compliant with federal contracting regulations.
“[I]n light of what we have learned during the audit, we have reason to believe these discrepancies are not isolated,” the inspector general stated. According to the final report, the Marshals Service responded by “establishing an onsite detention contract monitoring program at all private detention facilities.”
“We believe the USMS’s suggested actions demonstrate a commitment to improving its contractor oversight,” the inspector general concluded.
Problems with the Leavenworth facility itself included under-staffing, poor training, and overcrowding.
“[O]fficials had uninstalled beds prior to an American Correctional Association (ACA) inspection in 2011 in order to conceal from ACA that [Leavenworth] was triple bunking detainees,” the report stated.
The fifteen for-profit US Marshals Service prisons housed more than 9,500 prisoners, in February 2017. The population of the Leavenworth facility itself was 681.
