Josh Smith Is Out. The BOP He Leaves Is Not the One He Found.
Josh Smith resigned as Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons on August 25, with no stated reason. Director William Marshall announced it in a short note to staff the next morning, thanked him, and named no successor. Smith’s own farewell was longer and more personal. “Three decades ago, I walked through the gates of a federal prison as an inmate,” he wrote. Years later, pardoned by President Trump in 2021, he walked back in as the number two.
He was the first formerly incarcerated person to hold senior leadership at the Bureau. That was the point of hiring him, and everyone knew it. When Marshall appointed him in June 2025, he said Smith brought “a perspective shaped by lived experience” that the agency had never had at that level. Fourteen months later, the agency he is leaving is not the one he walked into.
What actually changed
The record is thicker than a year usually buys. Smith said himself that the bureaucracy made the job difficult. He also said he was proud of what moved anyway.
Leadership first. The Bureau changed how it picks wardens, bringing outside evaluators into a process that had run on internal seniority for decades. Smith personally asked for the retirement of several senior executives. In his CBS News interview after resigning, he said he helped switch out about 70% of the executive staff, including several top wardens. That is a purge by any name. Whether it was renovation or demolition depends on which side of a retirement letter you stood.
The National Resource Team sent assessment crews into institutions to look at staffing, training, morale, and infrastructure, starting at FCC Victorville. Smith traveled to more than 65 federal prisons, some visits unannounced, and started a podcast called “Transparency Talks.” For an agency whose standard communication style is the press release, a Deputy Director showing up unannounced and talking on camera was a genuine break in behavior.
Then the policy sweep. After the Bureau canceled its master collective bargaining agreement with the Council of Prison Locals, following a Trump executive order on bargaining at national security agencies, the pace changed. In March 2026 the BOP announced it had completed 37 policies in 90 days, calling it the most significant policy modernization in nearly three decades. The average of those policies had gone almost 13 years without an update. The oldest dated to 1997. Anyone who has tried to get a BOP Program Statement updated knows what that means. Those documents are the operating system of daily life inside, and most of them were older than the tablets inmates are about to get.
On infrastructure, the Bureau held its first Facilities Management Industry Day in January, pulling contractors and technical experts into a conversation the agency usually keeps in-house, and created Facilities Management Strike Teams, deployable crews of BOP employees sent to do repairs instead of waiting on outside contracting. That is what a $4 billion deferred maintenance backlog and new funding from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act look like when someone actually tries to spend the money on buildings.
The closures happened on this watch too. On July 1 the Bureau announced the closure of Beaumont FCI Low, Big Spring FCI and its satellite camp, La Tuna FCI and its satellite facilities, Lexington’s satellite camp, Petersburg FCI Low, and Taft FCI. We covered what that does to the 5,400 people displaced by it. Marshall’s line at the time was “We are a Bureau that acts.” That sentence describes the whole year.
The Securus tablet contract, awarded July 8, is part of the same push: a corrections-grade tablet for everyone in custody, messaging and video with family, coursework, career training, reentry tools. We have written about what that contract does not say, and those gaps are real. But the fact that the Bureau is moving at all on technology that every state system adopted years ago counts as a change.
What Smith said the job was for
“I believe we should really care about what kind of people we are turning back out into our neighborhoods,” he told CBS News. “I’m a tough-on-crime person, but I’m restorative in nature because they’re going to be my neighbor.”
His farewell put the same thought in writing: “Our correctional system must hold people accountable. But accountability and redemption are not opposites.” And: “My own life is proof of what can happen when accountability is followed by opportunity.”
That framing, from the man running the system, is the part of this tenure that outlasts the org chart. A BOP Deputy Director saying redemption is not the opposite of accountability is a sentence no previous office holder could have said with a straight face, because none of them had lived it.
Why the staff side applauded
The reaction from FCI Hazelton tells you the other half of the story. Jason Shaffer, a union official at the Preston County complex, called Smith’s appointment “a slap in the face” and told WAJR that his policies drove officers to retire early or transfer to other agencies. “It really affected our staffing, and we lost a lot of officers due to him being appointed,” Shaffer said. Staffing at Hazelton at times fell to 75%, with augmentation, the practice of putting untrained staff like teachers and cooks on security posts, filling the holes.
Union officials elsewhere were blunter. Joe Rojas, a retired corrections worker active in the Southeast region, told CBS News, “Inmates are elevated more than staff.” Fernando Lopez, a retired BOP employee and local union official, said he was forced to retire rather than fired after he criticized Smith on Facebook over a July 6, 2025 prison visit where, Lopez said, Smith ignored employees, spent his time with inmates, and ordered staff out of the room, telling the inmates he was “one of them.” Smith said he did not recall the incident. “I’ve been challenging a lot of processes,” he said. “It’s never going to be comfortable while I’m around.”
The staff anger is real, and some of it has substance. Losing bargaining rights while watching a former inmate direct the retirement of career executives is a lot to absorb in one year. The Hazelton staffing collapse is not an invention, whatever its causes.
The loose ends
Two things follow Smith out the door. First, the contracting questions. In August 2025 the BOP awarded a $183,400 contract to Precythe Sturm Advisory Group, run by Anne Precythe, the former Missouri corrections director, to help with warden hiring. Less than a year later, Prison Life Media, the media company affiliated with Smith’s Fourth Purpose Foundation, released a flattering documentary about Precythe, “Disruptors: Missouri, Anne Precythe.” Smith promoted it on LinkedIn. He says he had no role in the contract and disclosed the documentary when her firm was retained. The appearance is still what it is.
Second, Todd Chrisley. The pardoned reality star was allowed to tour facilities in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, spoke at the final Residential Drug Abuse Program graduation at FPC Pensacola, and has used his podcast to name BOP staff he wants fired, claiming he reports them to Smith. “I reported you to Josh Smith,” he told one employee on air. “I want you terminated.” Smith says he had no role in arranging Chrisley’s visits. A pardoned celebrity holding what amounts to a referral line into the Deputy Director’s office is not a governance structure, and the Bureau should say so plainly.
What stays
Smith is going back to Tennessee and the Fourth Purpose Foundation. Marshall, himself an outsider who ran the West Virginia Department of Corrections, stays as Director. The 37 rewritten policies, the warden selection changes, the strike teams, the tablet rollout, the closures: none of those die with a resignation letter. They are already in motion, and whoever takes the deputy chair inherits them.
“I leave proud of the direction we started moving,” Smith wrote. “This chapter has ended. The mission hasn’t.”
That is the honest summary. Whether the direction holds is the only question left, and it will take years to answer.