Peach Tree Times

A bill introduced by Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and passed by the Senate on Oct. 21 seeks to prevent escapes and make prisons in the U.S. safer for prisoners as well as reducing civil rights abuses.

SB 2899, “The Prison Camera Reform Act,” would upgrade security camera systems to ensure improved storage, logging and preservation of taped monitoring at prison facilities.

A press release from Ossoff’s office described the passed legislation as “bipartisan.”

“As divided as our country seems, the Senate’s passage of this historic bipartisan prison reform measure proves Americans can still come together to strengthen civil rights, public safety, and the rule of law,” Ossoff said in the release.

According to an AP report, 29 prisoners have escaped from federal jails in the past 18 months. Nearly half of them have not been caught. The report said some of the prisons suffer from inadequate surveillance and lax conditions, doors left unlocked and broken camera equipment.

Officials sometimes don’t notice a prisoner is missing for hours afterward, the report said.

The problem seems not to be with maximum security facilities housing the most dangerous prisoners, but with escapes from lower-security prisons that officials call “walk-aways,” AP reported. These are federal prisons that were originally designed to permit easier operations and allow prisoners to perform work like landscape maintenance without constant checking in and out.

The result is a gateway for contraband substances and items such as drugs and cellphones, and more frequent escapes, AP said.

One Texas prison was so vulnerable officials joked that it had “an open-door policy,” AP reported.

“Because of their size and the generally low risk the inmates pose, federal prison camps often have the lowest levels of staffing in the Bureau of Prisons’ (BOP) system, sometimes with just one officer working to supervise inmates during a shift," Cameron Lindsay, retired BOP warden, said in the AP report.

A statement from the BOP said the agency is striving to maintain safe and secure institutions and added that the prisoners at low-security jails present a minimal risk to the communities near them.

However, the AP report noted that the BOP has been plagued for years with violence, security issues and a shortage of staffers.

Ossoff’s press release said the BOP has 122 prisons in the U.S. with 38,000 employees and 120,000 federal inmates.

In February, Ossof got a commitment from U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to use the Justice Department's resources to ensure the human rights of prisoners. Last month the DOJ began an investigation of prisons in Georgia.