With just days left in his tenure, the embattled director of the federal prison system faced a bipartisan onslaught Tuesday as he refused to accept responsibility for a culture of corruption and misconduct that has plagued his agency for years. Bureau of Prisons Director Michael Carvajal, testifying before the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, insisted he had been shielded from problems by his underlings — even though he'd been copied on emails, and some of the troubles were detailed in reports generated by the agency's headquarters. Carvajal, who resigned in January and is set to be replaced next week by Oregon's state prison director Colette Peters, blamed the size and structure of the Bureau of Prisons for his ignorance on issues such as inmate suicides, sexual abuse, and the free flow of drugs, weapons and other contraband that has roiled some of the agency's 122 facilities. Carvajal said several times that the Bureau of Prisons, the Justice Department's largest component with a budget of more than $8 billion — was a "very large and complex organization" and that there was "no possible way" for him to know everything that was going on. Carvajal's attempts to deflect responsibility for his leadership failings didn't sit well with the subcommittee's chairman, Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., nor its ranking member, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., whose scrutiny of the Bureau of Prisons was spurred in part by Associated Press reporting that has exposed myriad crises at the agency.
The director of the federal Bureau of Prisons was scolded Wednesday by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who say her lack of transparency is hampering their ability to help fix the agency.
Recent assaults on high-profile federal prisoners Derek Chauvin and Larry Nassar are renewing concerns about whether the federal Bureau of Prisons is capable of keeping people in its custody safe.
