WASHINGTON (Washington Insider Magazine) – A Senate panel investigating corruption and abuse at the troubled federal agency has subpoenaed the departing director of the Bureau of Prisons to appear.
A subpoena calling Michael Carvajal to testify at a hearing later in the month was served to him. Senator Jon Ossoff, the head of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, made the subpoena public on Monday.
The panel’s subpoena was in response to an Associated Press investigation that revealed systemic problems with the institution, including widespread employee criminal conduct and a high rate of sexual misconduct at a California women’s jail.
Colette Peters, the director of Oregon’s prison system, has been appointed in Carvajal’s place, the Justice Department said last week. That announcement was made roughly 7 months after Carvajal announced his resignation in response to growing congressional pressure following the AP investigation.
Despite being a holdover from the Trump administration, Democrats currently enjoy control of both the Senate as well as the White House, making it unusual to issue a subpoena for Carvajal to come before the Senate panel. The decision to issue a subpoena demonstrates the lengths to which congressional investigators and Congress members are prepared to go in order to provide extra oversight to the contentious agency that has long avoided rigorous public scrutiny.
The Justice Department allegedly declined to make Carvajal accessible to testify voluntarily, according to Ossoff and Senator Ron Johnson, the committee’s senior Republican.
The Justice Department expressed disappointment that Ossoff had served a subpoena and noted that it had offered to substitute a lower-level official for Carvajal as well as substantial cooperation with the subcommittee’s investigation.
The department stated that it was “committed to focusing” Carvajal’s final days on putting the agency in position for Peters to take over, and that it would be disruptive for him to prepare for a senate hearing prior to Peters’s taking over.
At the epicenter of several issues inside the federal prison system has been Carvajal. During his turbulent tenure, the coronavirus spread extensively within federal prisons, the pandemic was poorly handled, there were numbers of deaths, escapes, and severely low staff numbers that slowed emergency response times.
The committee’s inquiry has looked at corruption, misconduct, and abuse at the federal prison system as a whole as well as at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta, the home state of Ossoff.
After President Joe Biden made a pledge during his campaign to advance criminal law reforms, the Biden administration came under growing pressure to fire Carvajal and take more steps to improve the federal prison system. One of the biggest departments under the Justice Department is the Bureau of Prisons, which has a budget for about 37,500 employees and more than 150,000 federal inmates. It has a budget of about $8 billion every year.
Peters will take over the agency in August.
