August 30, 2024

Bureau Of Prisons First Step Act Calculator Not Fully Implemented

Walter Pavlo

Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) Director Colette Peters has so many challenges facing the agency she leads that even glimmers of good news are touted as major successes. The BOP is suffering from a shortage of 6,500 staff (more than half of that for medical related openings), poor morale, and crumbling infrastructure. So when progress was made on a projected calculator to predict when prisoners would leave prison based on earning First Step Act credits to reduce their sentence by up to a year, it was a center piece to her testimony on Capitol Hill last month. The problem is, the calculator to project when prisoners will leave is simply not being used across the BOP.

Director Peters stated in a video posted on the BOP’s website referencing the First Step Act calculator that “The earn time calculator is up and running. Not only that, but we are now projecting for those in our care and custody, what the earliest potential release dates they could have if they engage properly inside our institutions, and if they continue with programming and treatment. And I think that's really going to help.” This is simply not happening despite the repeated assurances that it is.

The First Step Act allows mostly minimum and low security prisoners to earn up to 365 days off of their sentence by participating in programs and productive activities. According to the Federal Register which published theFinal Rule, “The FSA provides that ‘‘[a] prisoner shall earn 10 days of time credits for every 30 days of successful participation in evidence-based recidivism reduction programming or productive activities.’’ The BOP could not develop a computer program that complied with this exact provision of the law but instead developed a calculator that runs on the first of the month. If the prisoner did 30 days of programming the previous month then they get their credits to reduce their sentence. If not, then they do not get the credits. This sounds simple, but the result is lost days that result in prisoners, thousands of them, staying longer than the law allows.

If a prison surrenders to serve their sentence on the 15th of the month, when the calculator runs the next month they will get no First Step Act credits. Those days are supposedly put in a ‘bank’ to be used later. However, what I have found is that those programming days are just lost. The BOP went further and have said that they are using a forward looking assessment tool as part of their calculator of when a person is to be released from prison based on the First Step Act credits they will potentially earn. That too is not true.

Phillip DiLucente, a criminal attorney out of Pittsburgh, has a client who is nearing the end of a 12 month and 1 day prison. DiLucente did an analysis of when his client would be released from prison and determined his date of release should be August 30, 2024. However, when his client reached out to the BOP they told him he would not be released until after Labor Day (September 3, 2024). DiLucente told me in an interview, “It might be only a few days, but we are talking about the powers of the government to take away someone’s freedom because of a calculator problem. That is wrong and counter to everything I researched for this client.”

Not only is DiLucente right on his assessment, but the very person at the BOP who told him about the release date said that there was no forward looking calculator for First Step Act that could be used to release the man. DiLucente told me that the person he spoke with (He did not want to use the name of person for this article but provided the email correspondence documenting the exchange) said that “FSA FTC auto-calculations occur on a monthly basis, typically at the end of each month so the next auto-calculation should take place at the end of August 2024.  Once this occurs, an additional 15 days should be applied towards his PRD [Projected Release Date] (giving him a release date on or about August 30, 2024).”

“Here you have someone in the BOP telling me that my client cannot have his freedom because their calculator that determines a prison sentence only runs ‘typically at the end of each month’ and if it runs over the holiday that we have to wait until the next business day?” DiLucente said. “We’re not talking about some delay in receiving services, we are talking about an agency making up its own rules that are counter to the law that says that my client has served his debt to society.”

The BOP recently released information on the costs of incarceration for minimum security prisoners ($151.02/day). In cases like the one DiLucente worked, his alone accounts for $604 over the 4 additional days of incarceration, which does not sound like much. However, there are tens of thousands of prisoners serving extra days or weeks because of a calculator problem that Director Peters says is working.

I reached out to BOP Central Office and their position is that the Director stands by her comments based on the information she has received. However, how this is playing out on the front lines of the agency tells a different story.

Share
previous
There is no previous post
Go back to all posts
Next
There is no next post
Go back to all posts
Share