Our agency was established in 1930 to provide more progressive and humane care for federal inmates, professionalize the prison service, and ensure consistent and centralized administration of federal prisons. The BOP is a leader in correctional excellence and is consistently recognized for outstanding government stewardship. Find out why.

We protect public safety by ensuring that federal offenders serve their sentences of imprisonment in facilities that are safe, humane, cost-efficient, and appropriately secure, and provide reentry programming to ensure their successful return to the community.

The Bureau of Prisons provides a myriad of inmate programs to address criminogenic needs such as those related to substance abuse, education, employment, and more, thereby ensuring inmates' successful transition to the community. Accordingly, the federal recidivism rate has declined over the past couple of decades and is now 20% lower than the rate of many large state Departments of Corrections.