New U.S. Prison Boss Promises to Clean Up System Riddled With Misconduct, Failures
Colette Peters, the new director of the federal Bureau of Prisons, has promised to do her job better than her more combative predecessor, vowing to fix a scandal-plagued system and regain the trust of the public,
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Colette Peters, the new director of the federal Bureau of Prisons, has promised to do her job well and better than her more combative predecessor, vowing to fix a scandal-plagued system and regain the trust of the public among a list of other top priorities, report Michael R. Sisak and Michael Basalmo for the Associated Press. “The buck stops with me,” she said in testimony Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
However, she also cautioned that her goals for the system that includes 122 facilities, 159,000 inmates and a budget of more than $8 billion will take time to achieve. She faces rampant sexual abuse of inmates by staff and other staff criminal conduct, chronic understaffing hampering emergency responses, escapes and deaths, and much more. Previously the director of Oregon’s state prison system, Peters was brought in to run the Bureau of Prisons as a reform-minded outsider. Unlike past directors who worked their way up the ranks, she’d never been a federal prison employee before taking the top job.
