Colette Peters has resigned on Trump’s first day in office.
Colette Peters has resigned as Director of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) after 30 months on the job just as Donald Trump was inaugurated on Monday. Deputy Director William Lathrop will take over as acting director. An Agency outsider, Peters took the BOP job after heading the Oregon Department of Corrections. The challenges she faced at the BOP on day-one of her job in August 2023 were pretty much the same at the end; staffing shortages, crumbling buildings and poor morale.
Soon after Trump was elected, Peters announced the closure of 6 male federal prison camps and 1 female facility, FCI Dublin. Dublin was the facility that earned the name “rape club,” after its warden, chaplain and a number of staff members were convicted of inappropriate sexual relationships with a number of women prisoners. In December, the BOP settled a civil lawsuit brought by 103 women who were incarcerated at FCI Dublin in the amount of $116 million.
Peters seemed to have a good relationship with Congress. In appearances in front of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, she plainly spoke about the challenges the BOP faced but she had trouble getting results. Many of those challenges she inherited from previous directors. Joe Biden signed the Federal Prison Oversight Law in 2024 which allowed the Office of Inspector General (OIG) to conduct more unannounced prison inspections. Of the inspections OIG has done over the years, it found significant shortages of staff, poor medical care of prisoners, rotten food and dirty living conditions. While Peters said she welcomed the law, it has not yet been funded.
There were problems that Peters just could not fix. Staffing, no matter how much money was spent to increase salaries and retention bonuses, was proven to have only modest success. One recent inspection by OIG at FMC Devens, one of seven medical centers in the BOP, had “twenty percent of positions in Correctional Services vacant, as well as 24 percent in Health Services and 39 percent in Psychology Services” leading to “compromise FMC Devens’s ability to provide adequate healthcare to inmates.” Staffing shortages nationwide led to extended lockdowns at facilities and reduced programming.
The BOP said it needs over $3 billion to bring its aging prisons up to modern standards. However, year after year, the BOP received only a fraction of that which only worsened the problem. The closure of six male prisons, three of which were stand-alone male prisons, was an effort to reduce costs but it was too little, too late.
Peters did make progress on the First Step Act, Trumps hallmark law that allowed many minimum and low security prisoners to reduce their sentences by participating in programming and productive activities. The First Step Act led to the early release of nearly 50,000 prisoners but was plagued by problems in calculating the credits which resulted in many people staying in prison longer than the law required. In addition, the BOP’s lack of halfway house space led to people staying incarcerated in institutions much longer than necessary.
Peters attempted to take make a move in public transparency by openly talking about the problems of the BOP through an extensive interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes. The interview did little to change the perceptions of the public or the people that worked at the BOP. There were awkward moments when Peters was unable to state how many workers were needed to fully staff the prisons and also when Peters walked around the question of whether she owed an apology to female inmates who were sexually assaulted by staff.
The relationship with front line staff in the prisons was also strained during Peters’ tenure. While Peters attempted to put on a face of a kinder, gentler BOP, staff continued to feel the pressures of long hours and mixed assignments as a result of augmentation (a practice that allows medical staff, case managers or executive assistants to act as corrections officers where there are shortages). There was little progress made with mending relationships with union representatives who represent many front line workers in the prisons. The BOP ranked near the bottom in employee job satisfaction among over 430 federal agencies. The union is also seeking to reverse the closure of the prisons that Peters announced in December.
It became clear when Trump was elected that changes were coming throughout the government. In his first day as president he called for a temporary hiring freeze and a return of all employees to the office, a remnant of the COVID-19 era. As it relates to corrections, Trump favored the use of private prisons, a practice that both Barack Obama and Biden discouraged. In fact, Trump issued an executive order on his first day reversing the Biden ban on private prisons.
The BOP is a complicated agency. With an annual budget of $8.3 billion, it has seen the number of prisoners decrease by nearly 50,000 over the past twelve years yet its costs continue to increase. Healthcare costs, inefficiencies associated with old buildings and excessive overtime to meet the demands of supervising 150,000 prisoners 24/7 continues to drive expenses.
Trump will want his own person as director and rumors started swirling after the election as to whether Peters would survive to serve another administration. It is likely that the Trump administration will look outside of the agency for even more change. With Peters’ exit, it will mean that the next director will be the sixth since Trump took office for his first term. There is a need for stability with an agency that has such a vital interest to our national security. While nearly 50% of all the federal prisoners are minimum or low security, there are many violent prisoners held at higher security prisons.
The new Trump administration believes it is poised to make big changes and control of the House and Senate by Republicans will lead to bold moves. The non-governmental agency Department of Government Efficiency has promised to cut trillions of dollars from the government. With one of the largest budgets in the Department of Justice, the BOP is ripe for a makeover, but it will take a strong leader to guide the agency to stability while also making it more efficient and humane.
