Ms. Peters, a former director of the Oregon Department of Corrections who was named to her current post this summer, replaced Michael Carvajal, a career corrections official criticized for his reluctance to hold prison officials accountable. She is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, where she is expected to discuss some of the changes the department will propose.
Ms. Monaco said she selected Ms. Peters, in part, because she once had served as the inspector general of Oregon’s prison system, which made her more inclined to scrutinize, rather than merely run, the federal prison bureau.
“Look, she’s a former I.G. — she takes very, very seriously the importance of accountability in the correction system,” Ms. Monaco said. “It’s a new leadership that is focused on accountability and reform.”
Nonetheless, Ms. Peters inherits an agency that has suffered from chronic underfunding, and an acute labor shortage that has often left federal prisons competing against better-funded local and state systems for a relatively small pool of qualified, veteran corrections workers.
Mr. Carvajal, a longtime department official who began his career in 1992 as a corrections officer in Texas, was tapped to run the bureau in February 2020 by the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr. Mr. Carvajal took over just as the coronavirus began to sweep through the nation’s prisons, and drew criticism from lawmakers in both parties.
But the system was in crisis long before his tenure. In 2019, the House Subcommittee on National Security found that widespread misconduct in the federal prison system was tolerated and routinely covered up or ignored, including among senior officials. The report also found that a permissive environment often made lower-ranking employees targets of abuse — including sexual assault and harassment — by prisoners and staff members.
That report followed a 2018 investigation by The New York Times that documented the harsh treatment endured by female employees, and a pattern of retaliation, professional sabotage and firings faced by female whistle-blowers.
