First Hearing on 7,000 D.C. Inmates Since City Asked U.S. to Assume Control (10/15/07)

Washington, DC-- Fresh from her second visit to a federal prison housing D.C. inmates last Friday, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) will hear witnesses in the first federal oversight hearing since District prisoners were transferred by the city to federal control almost ten years ago, entitled, "Doing Time: Are D.C. Prisoners Being Adequately Prepared for Re-Entry with Equal Access to BOP Services?", on Tuesday, October 16, 2007 at 2 PM in Room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building. Witnesses include two former inmates, U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) Director Harley G. Lappin, Rivers Correctional Institution Warden George E. Snyder, Acting President of the University of the District of Columbia Stanley Jackson, and experts and leaders in re-entry programs and prison issues. The hearing, requested by the Congresswoman before the Subcommittee on Federal Workforce, Post Service, and the District of Columbia, on which Norton serves, is expected to uncover legal issues that keep D.C. inmates from receiving equal access to services in federal BOP facilities and in the BOP privately contracted Rivers facility. Norton is particularly concerned that residents receive adequate drug abuse treatment in light of the District's 65 percent recidivism rate compared with 40 percent for the BOP system.

District residents are the only Americans in Rivers Correctional Institution in Winton, North Carolina, a privately contracted BOP facility, where D.C. residents are housed along with 500 criminal aliens, and where services differ substantially from BOP prisons. Norton has begun a comprehensive investigation of BOP responsibility for 7,000 residents scattered throughout the United States who, she says, have been "all but forgotten by the Congress and the District since the 1997 Revitalization Act closed the old Lorton, Virginia facility, where D.C. inmates were sent for decades." With the change in control of Congress, Norton has been able to assert federal jurisdiction for the first time. In addition to her trip to the federal prison at Cumberland Maryland last Friday, she visited Rivers in August and held a video-conference town meeting with Rivers inmates and her Commission on Black Men and Boys in September. The tours of the facility and interviews with prison officials and inmates in preparation for Tuesday's hearing already have revealed structural issues and unique problems with integrating state felons into a federal prison that need congressional attention.