West Virginia Prison Chief Tapped to Helm BOP
On April 10, 2025, Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) announced his pick to assume control of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP): William K. “Billy” Marshall III, Commissioner of the West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR).
The BOP has been leaderless since Trump assumed office in January 2025—the same day that former Director Collette Peters resigned; as PLN reported, she then sued for wrongful dismissal and claimed she was forced out. [See: PLN, Apr. 2025, p.51.]
Marshall was elevated to lead the DCR in January 2023, just before former Gov. Jim Justice (R) called a special legislative session that summer to push through a law barring any state prisoner medical care not deemed “medically necessary”—a determination the law also left to prison officials, not doctors.
The law was not an illogical next step, since the state’s supreme court had ruled early in June 2023 that prison doctors were not “medical providers” under West Virginia malpractice law, which meant that they could not be sued, as PLN also reported. [See: PLN, Jan. 2024, p.59.]
Marshall came out of retirement to join the DCR in 2018, after a 25-year career with the state Highway Patrol. He was in the top job when the state agreed to pay $4 million to settle a class-action challenge to conditions at DCR’s Southern Regional Jail. [See: PLN, July 2024, p.59.]
His new job is an order of magnitude bigger: the DCR confines 6,000 prisoners, while BOP cages 155,000. Both prison systems are chronically understaffed, but Marshall oversaw a massive pay hike for West Virginia guards. In contrast, the BOP just took away retention bonuses that inflated the paychecks of some federal prison guards by 25%.
Source: Forbes
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