Federal Bureau of Prisons BOP

Congress created the Federal Bureau of Prisons on May 14, 1930, to manage the handful of federal penitentiaries then operating, including Leavenworth and Atlanta. The federal prison population grew slowly for decades, then rose steeply from the 1980s through the early 2010s with mandatory minimum drug sentences and the end of federal parole, peaking above two hundred thousand. It has since fallen to roughly 155,000 people held in about 120 facilities.

The bureau operates prisons at several security levels, from minimum-security camps to the supermax penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, along with medical centers and residential reentry centers in communities. It employs more than thirty thousand staff and runs work programs through Federal Prison Industries, education, drug treatment, and programs under the First Step Act of 2018, which lets eligible prisoners earn time credits toward earlier release to community supervision.

The bureau has faced persistent problems with understaffing, aging buildings, deaths in custody, sexual abuse by staff, which led to the closure of the women's prison in Dublin, California, in 2024, and the 2019 death of Jeffrey Epstein in a federal jail. Its director is appointed by the Attorney General without Senate confirmation, which some in Congress have proposed changing. In 2025 the administration also proposed reopening the former penitentiary on Alcatraz Island.