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Thousands Held in Federal Prisons for Too Long, Report Finds

The Butner Federal Correctional Complex in Butner, N.C., last November. A government report said that more than 4,300 prisoners were held in federal prisons beyond their release dates from 2009 to 2014.Credit...Gerry Broome/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — More than 4,300 federal inmates were kept in prison beyond their scheduled release dates from 2009 to 2014 — some of them for an extra year or more, according to a report released on Tuesday that highlighted wide confusion in the prison system.

The findings by the Justice Department’s inspector general are a potential embarrassment for the United States Bureau of Prisons at a time when the Obama administration has assailed what it says are unfair and unduly harsh sentences for many inmates, particularly minorities and nonviolent offenders.

While it is unusual for an inmate to be held past his sentence, the consequences “can be extraordinarily serious,” the report said. The delayed releases “deprive inmates of their liberty,” and have led to millions of dollars in added prison costs and legal settlements with former inmates, it concluded.

The investigation found that in the most egregious cases, avoidable errors by prison staffers led to 152 inmates being imprisoned beyond their release dates.

In a number of cases blamed on staff errors, prison officials failed to properly give inmates credit for time they had spent behind bars before their sentencing or they misinterpreted the terms of the sentence imposed by the judge, the report said.

The bulk of these cases led to inmates being kept behind bars for up to an additional month, but 61 were held for an extra month or longer, and three inmates were kept for more than a year beyond their scheduled release.

In nearly 4,200 other cases, inmates were held for extra time for reasons that prison officials said were beyond their control, such as a judge’s shortening a prisoner’s sentence to less than the time he had served, or a state or local court’s imposing a sentence that was not included in the federal system. The report did not break out the extra time served by these inmates.

Prison administrators told the inspector general’s office that “the vast majority of untimely releases are due to some form of technicality,” rather than a staff error, and probably could not have been prevented, the report said.

But the inspector general’s office said it was concerned that prison administrators did not have enough information about these thousands of “untimely” releases to say with certainty why they occurred.

The Obama administration has made criminal justice reform a top priority, redoubling efforts to review clemency appeals, banning solitary confinement for juvenile prisoners and pushing legislation to ease criminal sentences for some types of crimes, among other measures.

In recent weeks, the administration announced additional steps to ease the path back to society for some 600,000 inmates released each year.

But the inspector general’s report found that some inmates were not gaining their freedom when they expected.

The report did not identify the inmates improperly held for the longest stretches, but the description of one case matches that of Jermaine Hickman, a Minnesota man who was imprisoned for an additional 13 months after what was supposed to be a sentence of about five years for a bank robbery conviction.

Released from prison in 2014 at age 33, he was paid a settlement of $175,000 for the time he was wrongly imprisoned, officials said.

“That’s lost time I’ll never get back, lost time with my kids and family, lost time that they never get back, as well,” Mr. Hickman told a reporter after he was released.

Publicity over Mr. Hickman’s case in 2014 led the inspector general’s office to examine how such mistakes occur, and how often.

The review found that such cases were a rarity and appear to have decreased slightly in recent years.

Nearly 462,000 inmates were freed during the six years covered in the study, so the delayed cases — which the Bureau of Prisons refers to as “untimely” releases — were fewer than 1 percent of all releases.

But the inspector general’s office found that these mistakes caused “significant harm,” and it urged the prisons bureau to take steps to bolster its policies, reporting, training and interagency communications to prevent such missteps.

In a joint response included in the report, the prisons bureau and the Justice Department said they agreed with the recommendations and many of the underlying conclusions. But they differed with the inspector general over some issues, saying the report created the “misleading perception” that thousands of the “untimely releases” resulted from errors in the prison system, rather than technical factors outside its control, and could have been prevented.

While most of the mistakes documented in the report led to imprisoning inmates for too long, a few cases found the opposite problem. Prisoners were set free too early in five cases — in one case, by more than two and a half years.

The report said these early releases “can put communities at risk if the inmates are dangerous,” but it did not indicate if any additional crimes were committed by any of the five former prisoners when they were improperly freed.

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Follow Eric Lichtblau on Twitter @EricLichtblau.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Thousands of Inmates Are Held in Federal Prisons for Too Long, a Report Finds. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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