Ossoff joins Georgia civil rights leaders to announce federal prison reform bill signed into law

On Tuesday at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park in Atlanta, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff joined civil rights leaders to announce his criminal justice reform bill has been signed into law.

The Federal Prison Oversight Act will require the Department of Justice to complete regular unannounced inspections of all 122 federal prisons and publish the results within 60 days.

The bill passed with bipartisan support with backing from the Council of Prison Locals, which represents over 30,000 employees working with the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young said prison reform isn’t about guilt.

“It's out of a sense of responsibility, and a sense of meeting with people in jails all over the country, in fact, all over the world,” he said.  “They are a valuable part of our society, and we should help them reform and be involved in everything that's worthy about this democracy of ours.”

Ossoff said the goal of this bill is to restore civil and human rights to incarcerated people and those impacted by the criminal justice system, but it isn’t an easy one-time fix.

“The Bureau of Prisons, at the federal level, is a diseased bureaucracy that for decades has allowed conditions to deteriorate in federal prisons across the country,” the senator said. “My legislation, which is now law, is the most substantial effort in many years to bring real transparency and real oversight to the federal prison system.”

Other speakers at the event also called on Georgia’s leaders to implement similar oversight to address abuses at state and county level jails and prisons.

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Doug Ammar is the executive director of the Georgia Justice Association, a nonprofit doing prevention and support for people facing incarceration. Ammar said as a society we should not ignore what happens in jails.

“The vast majority of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in this country are someday coming home,” he said. “It is not only the right thing to do to pay attention to what happens in these institutions and to the people who reside there. It's also the smart thing to do to care about what happens to them, because trauma begets trauma.”

The bill will also create a new office within the Department of Justice to investigate abuse within prisons and a confidential hotline for inmates, family members, or legal representatives to file complaints.