The Chill of ICE - The Federal Bureau of Prisons Isn’t Just in Crisis; It’s Actively Choosing Harm
The Federal Bureau of Prisons has spent years telegraphing what people inside have known for decades: it is an agency in freefall. Crumbling infrastructure, chronic safety failures, and a catastrophic staffing crisis have all been raised not quietly by the BOP itself. Not a single federal prison in the United States is fully staffed. The result is a human-rights emergency disguised as administrative inconvenience.
To keep the lights on, the BOP has relied on the practice of “augmentation,” a bureaucratic euphemism that masks a dangerous reality: any employee, teacher, janitor, nurse, plumber, or even administrative assistant can be ordered to serve as a correctional officer. Essential medical and mental-health positions sit empty while untrained staff are conscripted into roles they never sought and are wholly unprepared to navigate. Predictably, the people who bear the brunt of this mismanagement are those with the least power: incarcerated people, especially women, who are overwhelmingly poor, many of whom entered prison already burdened by trauma, disability, and untreated illness.
Inside these prisons, the fallout is immediate and devastating. Officers working brutal overtime are exhausted, short-tempered, and often resentful. Programs mandated by law do not run. Women spend endless hours locked in their cells. Healthcare delays stretch into weeks or months. And in far too many cases, these conditions incubate violence, both sanctioned and unsanctioned, by the very people entrusted with “care, custody, and control.”
Yet the Trump administration’s renewed prioritization of immigration enforcement threatens to turn this crisis into a collapse. As ProPublica reports, ICE is aggressively recruiting staff with cash incentives, tuition reimbursements, and signing bonuses, lures targeted squarely at the same personnel pool the BOP depends on. And many are taking the bait.
This is not mere reshuffling within the federal bureaucracy. It is siphoning resources away from prisons already on the edge, and funneling them into an immigration enforcement system that detains people in similarly overcrowded, underregulated, and deadly conditions. When ICE arrests more people than it can house, overflow populations land in federal prisons, facilities that are already unable to meet the most basic human needs of the people currently inside.
The consequences are not theoretical. They have names.
Consider the death of Starsha Silva (age 36). She lived with a known heart condition while imprisoned at FCI Waseca. When doctors said she needed immediate surgery, correctional officers refused to let her stay at the hospital because there were not two staff members available to escort her.
After that, no one bothered to reschedule. Three weeks later, Starsha died, one more woman lost to a system that treats medical neglect as an administrative hiccup. She leaves behind four children.
Whether the BOP failed Starsha through indifference or logistical chaos, the result is the same: she died because our government locked her in a cage and denied her care. And Starsha is not alone.
Across the federal system, women report running out of soap, pads, food, and toilet paper. They describe guards retaliating during staff shortages, using lockdowns and force more frequently. They recount going months without mandated programming, medical appointments, or case-management reviews, making even the faintest hope of reunifying with their children feel impossibly distant.
This is what it means when a nation throws people away: the conditions become the punishment. And then the punishment becomes the point.
Against this backdrop, the notion of ramping up arrests, of feeding more bodies into a machinery that cannot care for the human beings already inside, borders on state-sponsored cruelty. Regardless of one’s stance on incarceration, no civilized society should tolerate a government that cages people without guaranteeing food, water, medical care, and basic sanitation. History is unambiguous in its verdict on regimes that normalized such neglect.
The BOP’s own admissions make one truth impossible to ignore: it cannot safely or humanely confine the population it currently has. And if an institution cannot meet the minimum standards of human survival, its moral and operational legitimacy collapses.
There is, however, a path forward, one rooted not in expanding cages but in emptying them.
Compassionate release is one immediate mechanism, especially for those who are elderly, gravely ill, or imprisoned far from their children, because federal policy continues to fracture families rather than heal them. The aging population in federal prisons is not only a logistical crisis but a moral indictment. No one can plausibly argue that freeing sick grandmothers poses a threat to public safety. As countless women have said themselves, the threat they pose is dwarfed by the threat posed to them.
And for those who insist on more punishment, look again at what imprisonment in America actually is today: collapsing buildings, starvation-level food rations, sexual abuse scandals that reach to the top ranks of the BOP, 23-hour lockdowns, medical neglect, and staff so absent or overwhelmed that women die waiting for someone to drive them to the hospital.
If the goal is punishment, these women have endured more than the state will ever admit out loud.
If the goal is public safety, these conditions have the opposite effect.
If the goal is justice, real justice, then the only honest answer is to start shrinking the system that has shown, again and again, that it cannot be trusted with human life.
A government that cannot care for the people it cages has no business caging them at all.
Disclaimer
This blog serves as a platform for members of The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls (TNC) to share their thoughts, ideas, work, experiences, and creative expression. Occasionally, third-party content is also shared on this platform. The views and opinions expressed in individual submissions and third-party pieces are those of the contributing authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinions, policies, positions, or perspectives of The National Council, its leadership, members, or partners.
We believe that every voice deserves to be heard. This space uplifts the diverse lived experiences of our community and honors the right of each person to speak their truth. While contributions may vary in perspective, together they reflect the power of collective storytelling and the urgent need for change.
