Establishment of the Oregon Department of Prisons in focus of a government report

The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Justice published a report of FCI Sheridan, considered one of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ prison complexes within the United States. The report specifically highlighted Sheridan’s problem areas, but most of those are simply challenges that exist throughout the BOP. The report reflects the findings of one other unannounced inspection of a BOP facility (see reports here for Tallahassee And He asked).

The OIG concluded that Sheridan “…has a significant shortage of correctional officers and health care workers—a problem that exists at many BOP facilities—that has created widespread and troubling operational challenges at FCI Sheridan that significantly impact the health, welfare, and safety of staff and inmates.” BOP Director Colette Peters has visited a variety of prisons across the country and recently closed the troubled women’s prison FCI Dublin (California) after government agents raided the power in March 2024. The OverseerKaplan and other correctional officers were charged with raping female inmates.

The OIG said it had planned to conduct a variety of these unannounced visits, and Sheridan has now been added to the list of facilities with major problems. The OIG found that there have been significant staffing shortages, an issue for the BOP across the country, leading to FCI Sheridan not having correctional officers available to accompany inmates to outside medical providers (inmates have to be accompanied by staff to medical appointments or hospitalizations). Specifically, the OIG found that in its inspections, 101 outside appointments had been canceled between January and November 2023 because there have been not enough staff available to accompany inmates to those appointments.

The OIG also found a severe shortage of FCI Sheridan staff who administer BOP’s Residential Drug Abuse Program (RDAP). At the time of the visit, only 5 of 16 positions were filled. It is value noting that other prisons have recently discontinued the RDAP program, which may reduce prison sentences by up to 1 12 months upon successful completion. At FCI Sheridan, shortages resulted in the power being unable to supply the RDAP to many eligible inmates who had been transferred from other facilities specifically to take part in FCI Sheridan’s program. Three days after the OIG concluded its inspection, BOP Director Colette Peters suspended the RDAP at FCI Sheridan’s minimum security prison camp.

Lockdowns are also a known problem throughout the BOP on account of too few staff (particularly correctional officers) being unavailable to work within the facilities. At FCI Sheridan, the OIG concluded that the correctional officer emptiness rate has resulted in facility management not all the time with the ability to fill all inmate monitoring positions and subsequently not having the staff it needs to soundly monitor inmates. As a result, inmates are routinely confined to their cells through the day and thus are sometimes unable to take part in programs and recreational activities. In addition to the RDAP, there have been 3 vacancies within the Mental Health Services Department (along with 11 vacancies in drug treatment staff), in addition to 3 vacancies within the Education Department, which limited program offerings and contributed to waiting lists at FCI Sheridan.

Related to medical care, OPIG also found a variety of violations, specifically: 1) Medications were faraway from the packaging hours before the subsequent pill shelling out was scheduled to start, increasing the chance of administration error because the worker who removed the medication from the packaging was not all the time the worker who later allotted it; 2) BOP employees reused the identical bag when crushing different medications. This can result in cross-contamination of medicines, which may cause an inmate to have an antagonistic response to the contaminated medication; 3) BOP didn’t consistently discover each patient by checking two types of identification before shelling out medications to them.

Describing a situation through which an inmate took matters into his own hands to acquire medical treatment, OIG wrote, “…we discovered that shortly before our inspection, an inmate faked a suicide attempt in order to obtain medical care for an untreated ingrown hair that had become infected. When he was finally examined after the faked suicide attempt, he had to be hospitalized for 5 days to treat the infection.”

Finally, the OIG found that FCI Sheridan didn’t centrally record the variety of all allegations of inmate-on-inmate sexual misconduct reported to staff. The failure to accurately record these allegations undermines the flexibility of each FCI Sheridan and the BOP to gather data compliant with the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA).