Congress is poised to spend less next fiscal year on federal prison infrastructure, even as a federal watchdog reported this year that the agency is in dire need and has lowballed maintenance funding requests for years.
A report from the Justice Department’s inspector general earlier this year featured images of crumbling and worn-out facilities in the federal Bureau of Prisons, a system in which about a third of the institutions are more than 50 years old.
Federal prisons across the nation need maintenance, and three facilities were in such bad shape that they were fully or partially closed as of last fall, the DOJ inspector general’s office reported in May.
