A disagreement with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner led to the resignation of the retired two-star Army general in charge of the Federal Bureau of Prisons last week.
Retired Army Major Gen. Mark Inch submitted his resignation before a May 18 White House meeting that focused on prison reform, The New York Times reported Thursday.
Kushner has been working on reforming the prison system, although Sessions has pushed back on some of his suggestions. According to the Times, Inch was left on the sidelines as Kushner and Sessions squabbled. Two days before the aforementioned meeting — after which President Donald Trump spoke about the topic — Inch turned in his resignation letter.
The Times reported that Inch was cleaning out his desk by the time the meeting with Trump and the debate’s stakeholders began. He began working at the agency last September.
“The rap against Gen. Inch is that he wasn’t a real reformer. In that sense, his departure is an opportunity,” Families Against Mandatory Minimums President Kevin Ring told the Times. “There’s a real struggle going on now about whether or not to reform the bureau, and it was increasingly clear that he wasn’t in a position to reform that agency.”
The Times noted that Kushner would often invite Inch to meetings about prison reform, but Sessions would send someone else instead.
The Trump administration has made a concerted effort to reform the nation’s prison system, which includes promoting the Prison Reform and Redemption Act. That legislation would mandate the Department of Justice to put together recidivism reduction programs and other related efforts designed to keep people out of prison once they’re released.
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