Officials

Back to Officials

Offical

Name: Lappin, Harley
Current Position: Previous Director
Harley G. Lappin served as the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons from April 3, 2003, until his retirement in May 2011.
 
A native of Akron, Ohio, Lappin earned his B.A. in forensic studies from Indiana University (Bloomington, IN) in 1978 and his M.A. in criminal justice and correctional administration from Kent State University (Kent, OH) in 1985. Lappin is a career BOP public administrator, who first went to work for the BOP in 1985 as a Case Manager at the Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana, Texas. He was subsequently promoted to Central Inmate Monitoring Administrator at the Western Regional Office in Belmont, CA. In 1989, Lappin moved to FCI’s Jesup, Georgia, location as Camp Administrator, and became Associate Warden for the Federal Medical Center in Carville, LA in 1991. In 1993 he was selected as Branch Administrator of the Program Review Division at the Bureau’s Central Office in Washington, D.C. He was promoted to warden at the FCI in Butner, North Carolina in 1996, and in 1998 became warden at the United States Penitentiary (USP), Terre Haute, Indiana. He was promoted to Regional Director of the Mid-Atlantic region in July 2001. He was sworn in as BOP director in 2003.
 
Lappin presided over the first two executions in the federal system since 1963—the first of which was “Oklahoma City bomber” Timothy McVeigh. The second was that of murderer and drug trafficker Juan Raul Garza in 2001.
 
After retiring from government service, Lappin went straight to work as Executive Vice President and Chief Corrections Officer of Corrections Corporation of America (CCO), the largest operator of private prisons in the United States.
 
Bookmark and Share