The layoffs are off.
Corrections officers and other employees of the federal Bureau of Prisons will avoid the mass furloughs looming for government employees under automatic budget cuts this month, according to a Justice Department memorandum obtained late Friday by The Citizens' Voice.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in the memo that he transferred $150 million of department funds to the Bureau of Prisons to maintain current staffing at its facilities through the end of the fiscal year in September.
Mr. Holder's decision came three weeks after an inmate murdered Corrections Officer Eric Williams at the high-security U.S. Penitentiary at Canaan in Wayne County.
After the Feb. 25 attack, Officer Williams' colleagues and union officials warned that the already unsafe working conditions at federal prisons would deteriorate further if the planned furloughs were implemented.
Mr. Holder delivered a eulogy at Officer Williams' funeral and told mourners the 34-year-old Nanticoke native's death would not be "in vain."
The loss each day of thousands of corrections officers and other staff at the bureau's 119 federal prison facilities "would have created serious threats to the lives and safety of our staff, inmates, and the public," Mr. Holder wrote in the memo Friday to Justice Department employees.
The Citizens' Voice broke the news of Mr. Holder's decision on its website, citizensvoice.com, at 3 a.m. Saturday. The Citizens' Voice and The Sunday Times share a parent company, Times-Shamrock Communications.
The forced federal budget cuts, known as sequestration, shrunk Bureau of Prisons funding by 5 percent, or $339 million, including $330 million for salaries, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget.
A continuing resolution passed by Congress on Thursday extended funding for federal government operations through Sept. 30 and provided Mr. Holder the budget certainty to halt the prisons furloughs.
If the furloughs had taken effect, the bureau's staffing levels would have reduced by a collective 3,570 employees each day, Mr. Holder said. At Canaan, union officials said, 30 workers would have been forced to take an unpaid day off each week.
U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, who attended Mr. Williams' wake and supported the expansion of a program arming corrections officers with pepper spray, lobbied his colleagues last week to issue the resolution that allowed Mr. Holder to maintain prison funding.
Mr. Casey, on Capitol Hill for an early morning budget vote, lauded Mr. Holder's decision and the congressional resolution in a statement to The Citizens' Voice at 1:20 a.m. Saturday.
"I'm pleased that the DOJ and Congress have worked together on a plan that will stop the furlough of federal corrections officers for the remainder of the fiscal year," Mr. Casey said. "This is a step in the right direction, but much more needs to be done moving forward to continue to provide our federal prisons with adequate staffing."
U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright, D-17, Moosic, called Mr. Holder's decision an "obvious move that needs to be taken." He added that Officer Williams' murder - the first of a federal corrections officer since 2008 - had to have impacted Mr. Holder's decision to reverse the prison furloughs.
"I think Attorney General Holder got the picture," Mr. Cartwright said. "He came to the funeral. You could not meet the Williamses and not choke up."
Officer Williams was working alone in a cellblock of more than 100 inmates at the time he was attacked, equipped only with handcuffs and a radio with a panic button. An inmate repeatedly stabbed him with a crude, handmade knife.
The inmate, identified by authorities as Jessie Con-ui, is a murderer and a member of the prison gang the New Mexican Mafia. The 36-year-old Filipino immigrant was completing an 11-year sentence for his role in a drug trafficking ring. He was scheduled to complete the sentence in September and was to be returned to Arizona to serve a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 25 years for a 2002 slaying.
Contact the writers: bkalinowski@citizensvoice.com, @cvbobkal on Twitter; msisak@citizensvoice.com, @cvmikesisak on Twitter