The Bureau of Prisons changed the rule governing where federal prisoners are held, in a document the public learned about months later. Change Notice 5100.08 CN-3, signed May 6, 2026 by Director William K. Marshall III, struck the sentence binding the bureau's designation decisions to 18 U.S.C. § 3621(b), the statute that sets out the factors it must weigh, and inserted language from 28 U.S.C. § 509 allowing the attorney general to “designate or redesignate the place of a prisoner's imprisonment.”
The Marshall Project reported the change on September 18, 2026.
What the document does and does not do should be kept distinct. It gives the attorney general personal authority over individual placements. It does not say that authority will be used politically, and the revised text retains both an anti-favoritism provision and a requirement of consistency with § 3621(b). The fear that it enables political sorting is an inference from the breadth of the discretion and from how a similar decision was handled before, not something the notice states.
That precedent is Ghislaine Maxwell, moved in August 2025 from a low-security prison to a minimum-security camp. Rep. Deborah Ross (D-NC) said the policy “was established to retroactively approve moving Ghislaine Maxwell from a low-security prison, which arguably she shouldn't have been in, to Club Fed.” Maureen Baird, a former senior bureau official who helped write the assignment policy, said the bar on camp placement for sex offenders without a waiver is “not a gray area, not even a question.”
Liz Oyer, the former Justice Department pardon attorney, described the risk in both directions: “If you're MAGA, you might go to a minimum security camp, or if you've got a couple million bucks to spend, you could buy your way into a halfway house or even home detention... If you're prosecuted for protesting ICE, for example, or for vandalizing Trump's reflecting pool, you could serve your sentence alongside murderers and rapists.”
Janet Perdue, another former senior bureau official, made the operational objection: “This classification tool is the safest way to house people, that's safe for staff, and that's safe for inmates. If you start pulling people out of their element and putting them in places where it leaves them vulnerable, that can become a dangerous situation.”
The bureau's stated reason is narrower. A spokesperson said the revision was meant to “formally memorialize” the attorney general's statutory authority in light of litigation over the redesignation of federal inmates whose death sentences President Biden had commuted.
Blanche himself told senators during his confirmation that placement decisions would rest on “legitimate grounds, and not to favor or to retaliate against any person based on political considerations,” and told Sen. Richard Durbin that “decisions of this kind are made based on legitimate considerations, including safety and security.”
Reps. Deborah Ross, Ro Khanna and Jamie Raskin wrote to the bureau on June 12 with eleven questions about the change, including the observation that Maxwell's transfer “clearly violated existing BOP policy” because this notice did not yet exist when it happened. The questions are unanswered.