Even as the Justice Department announced that federal prisons would release vulnerable, nonviolent inmates to home confinement to avoid the spread of COVID-19, the agency was quietly adopting a policy that makes it harder for inmates to qualify for release, not easier. The result has been that more than 98% of inmates remain in federal custody, while a handful of celebrity inmates, like former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, have been released to home detention.

In two memos, one in late March and a second in early April, Attorney General William Barr directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which is part of the Justice Department, to begin identifying inmates who could safely be released to home confinement — essentially house arrest. They instructed prison officials to grant “priority treatment” to inmates deemed to present minimal risk to the public.

Separately, however, the Bureau of Prisons had drafted a 20-page policy document this year that altered a standard adopted only a year ago and made it harder for an inmate to qualify as minimum risk.

ProPublica obtained a copy of the document, which does not appear to have been finalized, and its existence surprised and baffled lawyers, prison reform advocates and inmates interviewed for this article. “It really tanks the whole enterprise if, once an instrument is selected, it can be strategically altered to make sure low-risk people don’t get released,” said Brandon Garrett, a law professor at Duke University who studies risk-assessment tools. “If you change the cut points, you’ve effectively changed the instrument.”

The original assessment tool emerged from the First Step Act, a major criminal justice overhaul passed in 2018. Known as PATTERN, for Prisoner Assessment Tool Targeting Estimated Risk and Needs, it assigns a pair of numbers — based on factors like age, prison courses completed and history of violence — that purport to predict the likelihood an inmate will commit a violent crime, or any crime, upon release. Inmates are assigned to one of four categories for risk of recidivism: minimum, low, medium or high. In a July 2019 report, the Justice Department published a chart delineating the range of scores that fall into each category. The law requires that the methodology be released “publicly on the Department of Justice website.”

Justin Long, a spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons, confirmed that the bureau had revised the risk categories without informing the public. The 2019 report was an “interim report,” Long wrote in an email. “The interim report mentioned that DOJ would seek feedback and update the tool accordingly, which was done.” That was news to people, like Garrett, who had provided feedback to the government on the rules.

The Justice Department, Long wrote, posted an update to its 2019 report in January “to reflect changes to the PATTERN tool.” But that update says nothing about categorizing inmates more restrictively. To the contrary, the changes it describes largely respond to the comments of experts who raised concerns about racial bias and who sought greater transparency. As for the draft policy document, Long wrote, it “was not authorized for release.”

The Bureau of Prisons’ reliance on the unpublished policy document has exacerbated widespread puzzlement about how the agency is implementing Barr’s home-confinement order. “There’s been nothing but confusion,” David Patton, the chief federal public defender for the New York City area, said. “We’ve received a steady stream of questions from clients about their scores, and we have no answers, because BOP doesn’t give us any.”

Fewer prisoners have been released than was expected when the attorney general made his announcement, lawyers say. About 3,050 inmates have been moved to home confinement as of May 21, Bureau of Prisons records show. That’s around 1.8% of the people under the bureau’s supervision. That figure is significantly smaller than the roughly 20% of inmates who fall into the minimum risk category (though it’s not automatic that all of them would qualify for release) under the 2019 rules.

The slow pace of prisoner releases has begun to attract attention. On May 19, a federal judge accused officials at the Elkton Federal Correctional Institution in Ohio — the site of a deadly coronavirus outbreak cited by Barr in his order — of moving too slowly to release inmates and “thumbing their noses” at Barr’s directive. He instructed them to expand the class of inmates eligible for home confinement by including inmates not only with minimum-risk scores, but also those said to have a low risk. The Justice Department has asked the Supreme Court to halt the order.

At the urging of Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who co-authored the First Step Act, the Justice Department’s inspector general has agreed to examine the scope of Barr’s directive as well as the Bureau of Prisons’ compliance with it and the agency’s overall response to the pandemic.

The process has been shrouded in mystery, as one inmate’s experience shows. Blayne Davis, 38, who pleaded guilty to fraud for an investment scam, is an inmate at the Pollock Federal Correctional Complex’s minimum-security prison camp, in central Louisiana. When he received his PATTERN scores in late April, they qualified him as minimum risk under the old scoring system. Davis expected to be eligible for home detention. Like many, he worried about exposure to the virus. At another federal prison just an hour to the south, several inmates had already died of COVID-19. The prison sometimes borrowed staff from Pollock.

Davis waited, in the beige-hued prison dorm where he lives, as officials called the names of inmates who had qualified for home confinement. The names kept coming, and Davis kept waiting, expecting to hear his name.

Then the names stopped. Perplexed, Davis asked prison staff why they hadn’t called his name. His score, they told him, put him in the low category, not the minimum.

Davis persisted, pointing to the chart in the 2019 Justice Department report. Ultimately, a prison staffer handed him a piece of paper. It contained a chart that, like the one in the 2019 report, assigned a range of PATTERN scores to each category. But this one was far more restrictive. According to the 2019 report, a male inmate with a violent-recidivism score of 21 or lower fell into the minimum-risk category. Davis’ score — a seven — put him firmly in that category. He wasn’t violent or a troublemaker. He’d completed over 30 classes while incarcerated.

Now, he was informed, the standard had gotten tougher. For a male inmate to be deemed at minimum risk of committing a violent crime upon release from prison, he needed a score of not 21 or less, but six or less. Davis had missed the mark by a single point.

The new chart looked suspect to Davis, as if somebody had typed it up hastily. It wasn’t on official letterhead, and there were a couple of glaring typos. The prison staff bristled when Davis pointed this out, according to his representatives, who later relayed his story and shared relevant documents. It was authentic, the staffers assured him. They had printed it off SallyPort, the Bureau of Prisons’ intranet. Davis didn’t know it at the time, but this new chart was drawn from the bureau’s unpublished draft policy document.

An official at the Pollock prison camp declined to respond to ProPublica’s questions, citing staff and inmate privacy. In an email, the official did, however, extend an invitation to visit the prison to interview inmates. Never mind the blaring red banner at the top of Pollock’s website: “All visiting at this facility has been suspended until further notice.” A formal request to interview Davis over the phone was met with silence.

President Donald Trump’s signature food aid program is sending less relief to New York and New England than other parts of the country, even though the Northeast has the most coronavirus cases. Some states — Maine and Alaska at least — have been left out completely so far.

The regional imbalances are an unintended side effect of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s strategy in hiring private contractors to distribute food, the agency said. It is now looking for ways to reach areas that were passed over.

“USDA is evaluating how we might expand access to the program in areas that are underserved,” the agency said in a statement.

Out of $1.2 billion in the program’s first round, just $46 million is going to the Northeast. The region, which encompasses New York and New England, has the most coronavirus cases but received the least money of any region except the Mountain Plains, which has almost half as many people.

By contrast, the Southwest (including Texas) is getting more than five times as much money even though it has only about 50% more people and a quarter as many coronavirus cases.

Put another way, the Northeast has 10% of the country’s population and 33% of COVID-19 cases but is receiving only 4% of food relief dollars, according to ProPublica’s analysis of data from the USDA, the Census Bureau and Johns Hopkins University.

The pandemic is also taking a severe economic toll on New England. According to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, unemployment claims from March 21 to April 11 equaled 16.6% of the region’s total workforce, and 36% of renters and 18% of homeowners in New England are at risk of being unable to make their payments.

Trump and his daughter Ivanka have personallyheralded the USDA’s new program, which is meant to deliver boxes of fruit, vegetables, meat and dairy to food banks, churches and other nonprofits. Instead of using its regular system for buying and distributing food, which typically handles nonperishable items in bulk, the USDA awarded contracts to private distributors.

The process was unusually fast for government contracting: Companies had only a week to apply, and the USDA announced the winners a week later.

Although the USDA announced the contracts on a regional basis, the agency had no method for allocating funding to each region — it just depended on which companies won their bids. “The amounts and locations awarded were based on the offers received and the evaluation of those offers,” the USDA said.

The relative dearth of distributors in the Northeast is making it harder for food banks there to meet the needs of their communities. In Rochester, New York, the Foodlink food bank consulted with dozens of companies that it has worked with about applying for the USDA contracts. But none of those bids were successful, and Foodlink didn’t have a relationship with any of the winning contractors.

Now the food bank is in touch with the winning distributors but has yet to receive any shipments. As a result, it doesn’t have much fresh food to give out, even as the city’s service hotline is getting a surge of calls from people needing food, according to Foodlink’s chief strategy officer, Mitch Gruber.

“We could have had more food sooner, and they could have guaranteed more geographic representation across the nation if the program had been designed around food banks and not around distributors,” Gruber, who’s also a Democratic member of Rochester’s city council, said in an interview. “Everyone’s genuinely trying to best connect surplus at farms with increased need at food banks, and I’m glad the USDA is trying to fill that void. The smartest way to have done it would be to fund the food banks and work backwards to food distributors and vendors to serve them, rather than to have the USDA work with distributors and vendors.”

Thus far, the USDA has awarded $1.2 billion worth of contracts to distributors, out of $3 billion available overall. The agency said the contracts were competitively evaluated based on the companies’ ability to deliver.

But some of the winning bids raised eyebrows because the companies appeared to lack experience in food distribution or did not have a proper USDA license. At the same time, some applicants with more traditional qualifications said their bids were denied on mistaken grounds.

Three key Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee asked the USDA to explain how it evaluated the bids, including if it checked companies’ licenses and considered equity across regions.

“We share USDA’s goal of providing effective and timely assistance to families, farmers, and food supply businesses like food distributors,” Reps. Stacey Plaskett, Jim Costa and Marcia Fudge said in a letter Friday to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue. “We are concerned, however, that contracts were awarded to entities with little to no experience in agriculture or food distribution and with little capacity to meet the obligations of their award.”

The USDA defended its selections. “A lot of groups and organizations have some very great abilities that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to assess by looking at the name of the organization,” Greg Ibach, the USDA’s under secretary for marketing and regulatory programs, said on a conference call with reporters on Tuesday. “We feel confident that between our screening process and our audit process that we will be able to assure that those companies will be successful in fulfilling the responsibilities and the design of our program.”

One of the rejected applicants was a local distributor in Maine called Native Maine Produce & Specialty Foods. The USDA told the company its application was missing a signature on a certain page, according to vice president of sales Jimmy Davolio. Davolio said he rechecked the paperwork and the signature was there.

“I don’t know what we could have missed,” Davolio said.

No other companies serving Maine won contracts either, so the state is receiving no food boxes, according to the state Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry.

“We were disappointed we didn’t get it, but now I’m more disappointed that the folks in Maine aren’t getting those funds,” Davolio said in an interview. “We bid where we thought we could help. Now I feel terrible.”

The state is sorely missing the relief as food bank demand has tripled in some places, at a statewide average of about 35%, according to Kristen Miale, president of the Auburn-based Good Shepherd Food Bank, which serves a statewide network. Maine’s growers are also hurting and looking for new customers since their primary buyers — restaurants and the food service industry — have been largely shuttered.

“We need to be distributing a lot more food. Our primary constraint is we just don’t have enough food to give out,” Miale said. “This program would be a huge help.”

Miale is hoping that the USDA will give Maine distributors another chance, taking into account the logistical challenges of a sprawling, rural state with islands and mountains.

“They kind of put out a one-size-fits-all approach and it didn’t fit for everybody,” Miale said. “So now let’s go back and look at it again.”

Maine’s agricultural commissioner, Amanda Beal, formally asked the USDA to reopen the bidding process in the fall to give Maine distributors time to develop a way to participate.

“Like all small businesses in Maine, farmers in our state have been significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic but are eager to continue to grow food for consumers,” Beal said in a letter to the USDA on Thursday. “Likewise, many families in Maine need extra support during this unprecedented time, and it has been projected that food insecurity in Maine could increase by as much as 39 percent in 2020 due to COVID-19. We are confident that the Farmers to Families Food Box Program can help provide much-needed support for both, but only if the program can be adapted and flexibility be given to fit individual state needs.”

In another corner of the country, Alaska was also left with no access to the program. Two companies submitted bids but the USDA didn’t accept them, according to Cara Durr, director of public engagement for the Food Bank of Alaska, which serves the entire state.

Though Alaska has kept its case count down to only about 400, the shutdowns imposed to control the outbreak have taken a steep economic toll and made it harder for remote communities — many inaccessible by road — to get needed supplies. The state’s budget is also heavily dependent on oil, whose price has cratered.

The Food Bank of Alaska found a workaround where one local company signed on as a subcontractor to a winning bidder. That company is now supplying hard fruits and vegetables such as potatoes, apples and oranges.

But they’re still not able to receive meat or dairy, and the shipments won’t reach outside Anchorage to more far-flung places like Fairbanks, Durr said.

“The cost to bring food up to Alaska wasn’t factored in,” Durr said. “We would have loved to have gotten more through this program. Supporting local in-state vendors when there are applications would have been a much better way to go, for our state at least.”

Beena Raghavendran contributed reporting.

Update, May 22, 2020: This article was updated to add a letter from three House Democrats to the USDA.