# Bureau of Prisons The **Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP)** is the [[Department of Justice]] component that runs the federal prison system. Congress created it on **May 14, 1930**, to manage eleven federal prisons. It now holds about **153,000** people in roughly 120 facilities, with about 34,000 staff (BOP's live counter, Oct 2026). It also carries out federal executions. Its director is appointed by the Attorney General and does not require Senate confirmation. ## A chronically failing agency BOP's problems are bipartisan, and older than the current administration: - **Staffing.** Chronic understaffing has forced teachers, nurses and cooks to work as guards ("augmentation"). - **Failed custody.** Its most notorious failure was the 2019 death of [[Jeffrey Epstein]] in a Manhattan jail. - **FCI Dublin.** Sexual abuse by staff at the California women's prison, which the agency idled in 2024 and announced in December 2024 it would close permanently, along with six other facilities. The 2025 reconciliation law ([[One Big Beautiful Bill Act]]) gave BOP **$5 billion**: about $3 billion for staffing and $2 billion for facilities. It was the largest infusion in years. ## Under the second Trump administration - **New director.** [[William K. Marshall III]], formerly West Virginia's corrections commissioner and a longtime state police officer, became the 13th director in **April 2025**. Deputy AG [[Todd Blanche]] swore him in. - **[[Ghislaine Maxwell]].** On **Aug 1, 2025**, days after two days of interviews with Blanche about the Epstein case, Maxwell was moved from FCI Tallahassee to the minimum-security **FPC Bryan** prison camp in Texas. Critics read the transfer, for a sex-trafficking offender, as a reward for cooperation. It is the sharpest example of BOP designation decisions becoming politically charged. - **Immigration detention.** Under a Feb 6, 2025 agreement, BOP opened space for **[[ICE]] detainees** at facilities in Miami, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Leavenworth and Berlin, New Hampshire. About 700 were held by late February 2025. That made the prison system part of the deportation capacity build-out. - **Alcatraz.** Trump announced on May 4, 2025 that he would **reopen Alcatraz**. BOP studied it, and the FY2027 budget requested **$152 million**. As of Oct 2026 it has not reopened, and the money awaits Congress. - **The death penalty.** Attorney General [[Pam Bondi]] lifted the federal execution moratorium on Feb 5, 2025. In April 2026 a DOJ report backed adding the firing squad alongside pentobarbital. **No federal execution has taken place since Jan 16, 2021**, and only three people remain on federal death row: Dylann Roof, Robert Bowers and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The 37 men whose sentences Biden commuted in December 2024 are being moved to the supermax ADX Florence (one source). The [[First Step Act]] (2018) earned-time credit system still runs through BOP's risk-assessment tool. How fast the agency applies credits remains a recurring oversight issue. ## Why it matters here BOP is where three second-term agendas meet: the expanded death penalty, immigration detention capacity, and custody decisions in politically sensitive cases. The Maxwell transfer showed the third clearly. A director who answers to the Deputy AG, with no Senate check, can make designation decisions that function as political ones. ## See Also - [[Department of Justice]] · [[DOJ Component Tree]] · [[Federal Law Enforcement Agencies Tree]] · [[Federal Agencies Hub]] - [[William K. Marshall III]] · [[Ghislaine Maxwell]] · [[First Step Act]] · [[ICE]]