Chronic staffing shortages in federal prisons and a lack of training have impeded implementation of a Trump-era law designed to give nonviolent inmates the opportunity for early release, locking some up longer and contributing to eroding morale, union leaders and rank-and-file staff members said in interviews.
Outgoing Bureau of Prisons Director Michael Carvajal was grilled this week by both Democratic and Republican senators at a contentious subcommittee hearing at which employee whistleblowers described unsanitary and unsafe conditions at a federal penitentiary in Atlanta and sexual abuse by staff members at a women's prison in California, among other allegations of misconduct.
Carvajal, a Trump administration holdover, announced his retirement in January amid criticism of a crisis-filled tenure marked by scandals at the beleaguered bureau and aggravated by low staffing levels during the coronavirus pandemic.
Staff members at some of the country's largest federal prisons said carrying out the First Step Act, a bipartisan law signed in 2018 by then-President Donald Trump, has been taxing, if not impossible.
"It's not going at all," Joe Rojas, the literacy coordinator at the Coleman Federal Corrections Complex in Florida, said of the First Step Act's implementation.
"I'm the education department, and we're never open, and if we are, it's barely," said Rojas, who is also the Southeast regional vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council of...
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