Audit of the Federal Bureau of Prisons' Monitoring of Inmate Communications to Prevent Radicalization

By The U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General

(U) Objective (U) The objective of this audit was to review the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ (BOP) policies, procedures, and practices for monitoring terrorist inmates and the BOP’s efforts to prevent further radicalization within its inmate population. (U) Results in Brief (U) As of March 2018, the BOP had more than 500 incarcerated inmates with a known nexus to domestic or international terrorism (terrorist inmates). BOP policy requires that all social communications of high-risk inmates, including terrorist inmates, are monitored. However, we found that the BOP had not identified all terrorist inmates in its custody and thus did not adequately monitor their communications. Although the BOP, in 2005, began to provide the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with a list of soon to be released inmates, we found BOP did not take appropriate steps to ensure that information about all formerly incarcerated terrorists was provided to the FBI. In addition, we found that terrorist inmates who had been placed under a Special Administrative Measure (SAM) requiring 100-percent live communication monitoring by the sponsoring law enforcement agency, which for most terrorist inmates is the FBI, were not being monitored effectively because of the technological limitations of the BOP’s monitoring capabilities. Further, between January 2015 and December 2017, we found that the BOP had not monitored or only partially monitored thousands of communications of high-risk inmates, including terrorist inmates not under a SAM directive; did not review thousands of inmate emails, some of which contained potentially concerning language; and permitted terrorist inmates to communicate with unknown or un-vetted contacts. (U) Recommendations (U) We make 19 recommendations to improve the BOP’s accounting for, monitoring of, and security over terrorist inmates

Washington, DC: The Department, 2020. 67p.