Bennett, James V. (1894–1978)

James V. Bennett was the second director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), serving longer than any other (1937 to 1964). Bennett played a role in establishing the centralized bureaucracy for overseeing the operation of federal prisons, the BOP, while working for the U.S. Bureau of Efficiency. In 1928, he produced a report, The Federal Penal and Correctional Problem, that described the deteriorating [Page 70]conditions caused by severe overcrowding at the three existing penitentiaries of the time—Leaven-worth (Kansas), Atlanta (Georgia), and McNeil Island (California). He identified three acts taken after 1920—the Prohibition Act, the Harrison Narcotic Act, and the Automobile Theft (Dyer) Act—as contributing to the rising number of federal inmates. Instead of proposing to expand the three existing federal prisons, Bennett reasoned that additional federal prisons should be built to reduce transportation costs and to preserve prison sizes that could be managed easily by one warden.

Prior to joining the Bureau of Efficiency and later the BOP, Bennett had graduated from Brown University (1918) and served as a cadet aviator in the Army Air Corps during World War I. Bennett received his law degree in 1926 from George Washington University. He was hired by the first director of the BOP, Sanford Bates, in 1929, shortly after the formal establishment of the BOP.

Bennett argued in 1935 that one of the key issues facing prison management was inmate idleness. One of his key contributions prior to assuming the directorship of the BOP was serving as the initial commissioner of prison industries, which since 1978 has been known by the trade name UNICOR. Under his leadership, legislation was written and enacted by Congress that established Federal Prison Industries, Inc. as a separate corporate entity in 1934. As a corporate entity, prison industries had its own board of directors and working capital that was separate from the federal appropriations process. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Sanford Bates established the policy that prison industries should be broadly diversified and provide little competition to any one industry in the private sector, and Bennett followed this policy as commissioner of prison industries and later as director of the BOP.

As director of the BOP, Bennett enacted a progressive philosophy regarding the treatment of staff and inmates, especially early in his career. Some of the accomplishments of Bennett may have been initiated during the Bates administration. For example, during the first month of Bennett's administration, all BOP personnel became part of the civil service. This replaced the political patronage system that had existed previously.

Bennett also established the BOP tradition of associating major job promotions with transfers in the 1940s. To combat local empire building and provincialism, as well as potential resistance to central office policy and directives, transfers were tied to accepting a position at a different prison. Some staff initially resisted. These days, however, it is commonly thought that the promotion-tenure link transformed the BOP from a collection of idiosyncratic prisons to a coordinated system under the control of central office.

Bennett and Bates opposed controlling inmates with the simple use of brute force. Sometime during the 1930s, either before or after Bennett assumed the directorship, the BOP disallowed the previous practice of allowing guards to carry billy clubs at penitentiaries. Bennett established the first halfway house used by a correctional agency in the United States to ease the adjustment of inmates back into society. Bennett also created the first “open prison” at Seagoville, Texas. This prison did not have a perimeter wall, fence, guard towers, or the other custody devices most typically associated with prisons. As Bennett noted in a paper delivered to the Institute of Illinois Academy of Criminology in 1955, “The emphasis throughout is on self-reliance, self-respect, and trustworthiness” (Roberts, 1980, p. 33).

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