The First Step Act, in plain English (part 1 of 3) federalprisondude.com/first-step-act How it works ============ The law passed in December 2018 and it told the Bureau to do three things: score everybody for risk, score everybody for needs, and pay people for programming. Everything else comes out of those three. The law - Three things Congress told the Bureau to build -------------------------------------------------------- The First Step Act (the 2018 law behind earned time credits) was signed on December 21, 2018. Underneath all the coverage it got, it handed the Bureau of Prisons three instructions, and everything in this guide traces back to one of them. Score everybody for risk. Score everybody for needs. Then build a standard menu of programs that address those needs, and pay people for doing them. The pay comes in three currencies: phone minutes, better housing, and time. The last one is the reason anybody pays attention. PATTERN is the risk half ------------------------ PATTERN (the risk score affecting your credits) stands for Prisoner Assessment Tool Targeting Estimated Risk and Need. It scores how likely the Bureau thinks you are to reoffend, and it puts you in one of four buckets: high, medium, low, or minimum. You get scored when your sentence starts, and rescored regularly after that. That score matters more than most people going in realize, because it does not work the way you would expect. You can earn credits at any risk level. You can only apply them at low or minimum. A medium score does not stop the meter running. It stops the payout. Only four of the fifteen things PATTERN looks at move because of programming: your education score, your drug program status, your program completions, and your work programs. Part four lists exactly which programs touch which item, and it is a short list. Everything else on the instrument is either fixed, like your age and your offense history, or it moves by staying out of trouble rather than by signing up for anything. You can score the instrument yourself if you want to see where you land. It runs in your browser and nothing you type leaves the page. SPARC is the needs half ----------------------- SPARC is the Standardized Prisoner Assessment for Reduction in Criminality. Where PATTERN asks how risky you are, SPARC asks what is actually wrong, across thirteen areas: The thirteen need areas - Anger and hostility - Antisocial peers - Cognitions - Dyslexia - Education - Family and parenting - Finance and poverty - Medical - Mental health - Recreation, leisure, and fitness - Substance use - Trauma - Work Staff recommend programs off the approved list based on which of those you scored into. You get reassessed through the sentence, so the recommendations shift as you go. Every program on the list carries a "change needs" answer, which is whether finishing it can actually clear the need it addresses. Some programs address a need and never resolve it. CBT for Chronic Pain addresses the medical need and clears nothing. That is worth knowing before you put eighteen hours into something expecting your assessment to look different at the end of it. The two kinds - EBRRs and productive activities ----------------------------------------------- Every approved program is one of two things. An EBRR is an evidence-based recidivism reduction program. These are the heavy ones: RDAP (a drug program that can cut up to a year), BRAVE, the Bureau Literacy Program, the apprenticeships, UNICOR (the better-paying prison work program). The Bureau's own definition is a structured activity that addresses an identified need and that research says reduces reoffending, or probably does. A PA is a productive activity. Lighter, supplemental, aimed mostly at people already sitting at low or minimum risk, though anyone can take one. There are 77 of these against 50 EBRRs. Both earn FSA credits (time off earned through programming) at exactly the same rate, because the rate has nothing to do with what you took. Where the difference actually shows up is the participation incentives, and those key off EBRR hours specifically. A hundred hours of EBRR gets you something a hundred hours of productive activity does not. What to do with this - The short version ---------------------------------------- If you read nothing else on this guide, read this and then read part two. Cheat sheet - PATTERN decides whether you can spend credits. SPARC decides what gets recommended to you. - Both get rerun during your sentence. Neither is a one-time verdict. - EBRR versus PA changes your incentives, not your credit rate. - Opt-in status decides whether any of it counts at all. That is the next part, and it is the one that costs people time. Opt-in status ============= You earn nothing until you are opted in. No credits, no phone minutes, none of it. And the days you spend opted out do not come back when you fix the problem. The switch - What opt-in status is ---------------------------------- Opt-in status is a flag on your record that says you are participating. It is the switch on everything the First Step Act gives you. Credits, phone minutes, the housing incentive, all of it runs through that one flag. It starts when you finish the needs assessment surveys in TRULINCS (the inmate email/phone/money system, all monitored). That is the whole entry fee. Sit down at the kiosk, answer the surveys, and the meter starts. Do that early. There is no reward for waiting and there is a real cost, which is the rest of this page. The seven - Seven things that put you in opt-out ------------------------------------------------ 1. Refusing the assessments in TRULINCS Including the dyslexia screening and the trauma screening. To get back in, complete them. 2. Refusing an assessment or screening a staff member runs in person Same fix. Complete them. 3. Declining a recommended program that matches an identified need This one leaves a program decline code on your record. To get back in, the code has to be removed or changed, which means a conversation with your unit team (the staff who run your daily life). 4. Refusing a required program The two that come up constantly are the Financial Responsibility Program and Drug Education. Start the program and you are back in. 5. A life sentence or a death sentence There is no way back from this one. It is a status, not a decision. 6. Disciplinary segregation in the SHU Not administrative detention. Disciplinary segregation, meaning the DHO (the officer who hears serious write-ups) sanctioned you to it. Opt-in comes back automatically the day you come off that status. 7. Leaving your designated institution for a full calendar day or more A furlough (a rare temporary authorized absence), a writ, an escorted trip, an outside hospital stay. Opt-in comes back automatically when you get back. The cost - The days do not come back ------------------------------------ Here is the part that quietly costs people real time. Days spent in opt-out are gone. They are not reinstated when you fix the problem. Two months of refusing to sign up for Drug Education is two months of credits you never get back, even after you sign up. The meter does not rewind, it just starts again. That is the argument for handling a decline code the week it appears instead of the month it appears. Every week it sits there is a week off the back end of your sentence. The ones nobody chose - Two of these are not your decision ---------------------------------------------------------- Look at the last two on that list again, because they are different in kind from the first four. A stretch in the SHU (solitary) under disciplinary segregation stops the clock. So does a medical trip out to a hospital. So does a writ that pulls you back to court for somebody else's case. Nobody asked you, and there is nothing to appeal. Families should know this one, because it explains a release date that moved the wrong way for no reason anybody explained. A month at an outside hospital is a month of credits that did not accrue. The status comes back on its own when the person comes back. The paused days stay paused. Getting back - How you get back in ---------------------------------- Mechanical, and nobody has to forgive you for anything. Cheat sheet - Complete the assessments if that was the problem. - Get the program decline code removed or changed if you turned down a recommendation. - Start the required program if you refused FRP or Drug Education. - Wait if it was the SHU or a trip out. Those come back on their own. > From the inside - The signup is not the hard part. Getting told > is. Nobody sat me down and explained any of this. The > assessments show up as a thing to do on the kiosk, and if you > are new and overwhelmed and the kiosk line is twelve deep, it > is very easy to put off for a month. That month is not free. > Ask your unit team, in writing, what your current status is and > whether anything is sitting on your record. Keep the copy. - > Eighteen months, men's low Check it - Ask what your status is ---------------------------------- Do not assume you are opted in because you are taking classes. Those are two different flags. Send your unit team a message asking for your current FSA status and whether any program decline code is on your record. Ask in writing, keep a copy of what you sent, and ask again if nothing comes back. That is the same advice as everything else involving staff, and it applies harder here because the cost of being wrong accrues daily. Earning and applying ==================== This is the single most misunderstood thing about the First Step Act, and getting it wrong costs people months. You can earn credits at any risk level. You can only spend them at low or minimum. The First Step Act, in plain English (part 2 of 3) federalprisondude.com/first-step-act Earning and applying (continued) ================================ Before anything else I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Whether you are eligible to earn credits at all comes down to your offense, your prior record, and who convicted you. That is a question for your lawyer and your unit team, not for a website. Two different words - Earning is not applying --------------------------------------------- Read this twice, because almost everybody runs the two together and the difference is worth months. Earning is the meter. If you are eligible, you earn 10 days of credit for every 30 days you spend in opt-in status. If you have scored low or minimum on two assessments in a row, that goes to 15 days for every 30. Applying is spending. Only people at low or minimum risk can apply the credits they earned. So a person sitting at medium risk, taking every class on the compound, is banking credits they cannot currently use. The work is not wasted, because the score gets rerun and programming is one of the things that moves it. But nothing comes off the front of that person's release date until the score comes down. The meter - What you earn, and what it is not based on ------------------------------------------------------ The rate - 10 days per 30 days in opt-in status, if you are eligible. - 15 days per 30 days once you have scored low or minimum on two consecutive assessments. - Zero for any day spent in opt-out status, and those days do not come back. Notice what is not in that list. Hours. Classes. How many programs you finished. Credits accrue on the calendar, in 30-day blocks, as long as you are opted in and moving. The "credit hours" number attached to every approved program is not days off your sentence and never has been. Nobody earns 500 days for finishing RDAP (a drug program that can cut up to a year). Part four covers what those hours are actually for. Eligibility to earn at all is a separate question from all of this. It comes from the nature of your current and prior offenses and from the convicting authority. It does not come from how hard you program. Some people are excluded by statute and no amount of participation changes that. Spending them - Who can apply credits, and who has to ask --------------------------------------------------------- Low or minimum risk, you apply them. That is the rule. Medium or high risk, you can petition the Warden. The Warden then decides three things: whether you present a danger to society, whether you have made a good faith effort to lower your risk level, and whether you are likely to reoffend. That is a real decision by a real person, not a form that gets stamped, and a good faith effort is exactly the kind of thing a paper trail of completed programs is for. Where they go - Credits go to two places ---------------------------------------- They do not shorten the sentence. They move the door. 1. Early transfer to supervised release Up to 365 days can go here. Two requirements: you have to actually have a term of supervised release (post-prison supervision; not parole) after the incarceration, and you cannot have a final order of deportation or removal against you. This is the one that comes off the front. 2. Prerelease custody Everything past that 365 goes toward the halfway house (RRC (the halfway house before release)) or home confinement (finishing a sentence at home under monitoring). You have to be eligible for prerelease custody and in opt-in status when the referral is made. The 365 days you spend on early transfer cannot be counted twice. They do not also buy prerelease time. What is left over after the cap is what feeds the halfway house calculation. If somebody has a final order of removal, they still earn credits for every program they finish. They just cannot apply them to early release. The work counts and the clock does not move, which is a genuinely brutal piece of arithmetic and one people find out about late. The stack - Good time and FSA credits are different things ---------------------------------------------------------- Good conduct time (days off for staying out of trouble) is 54 days a year for everybody who stays out of trouble. It comes off the sentence itself and the DHO (the officer who hears serious write-ups) is the only one who can take it. FSA credits do not touch the sentence. They move you into prerelease custody sooner and, up to a year of them, move up the supervised release date. They stack. If you are earning both, the working assumption most people land on is somewhere around 60 percent of the sentence imposed, though that is a rule of thumb and not a computation. If you want the actual arithmetic, the release date estimator does it in your browser, and nothing you type into it is sent anywhere. The strategy - What this adds up to ----------------------------------- The strategy that falls out of all this is boring, and it is correct. Cheat sheet - Get opted in fast. The surveys are the entry fee and they take an afternoon. - Stay opted in. Refuse nothing, including the programs you think are beneath you. - Take the programs that lower PATTERN, because the score is what unlocks spending. - Keep your record clean. The SHU stops the meter, and a fight can cost you more than the fight was worth. Anybody who quotes you a number of days off for a specific program is either wrong or selling something. The credit math runs on the calendar, not on the syllabus. The programs ============ Credit hours are not days off your sentence. Nobody has ever walked out 500 days early for finishing RDAP. Here is what the hours are really for, and which of the 127 approved programs can move your score. The list - 127 programs, and nothing else counts ------------------------------------------------ The Bureau publishes one list of programs it will give First Step Act credit for. As of the May 2026 revision there are 127 of them: 50 EBRRs and 77 productive activities. If a program is not on that list, it earns no credit. It does not matter how useful it is, how much work it takes, or that a staff member told you it counts. The full list is here, searchable, with the hours, the department that owns each one, and where it can be offered. The hours - Credit hours are not days off ----------------------------------------- Every program on the list carries a credit-hours number, and it is the single most misread field in the whole document. RDAP says 500. That is not 500 days off anybody's sentence. Neither is the 350 on BRAVE or the 240 on the Bureau Literacy Program. Credits accrue on the calendar in 30-day blocks, and part three covers exactly how. What the hours actually do is two things. They tell you how heavy the program is, which is useful when you are picking. And they feed the 100-hour threshold on the participation incentives below, which is the one place the number has real consequences. The payout - The four participation incentives ---------------------------------------------- These go to anybody in opt-in status. They are separate from time credits, and people forget they exist. Cheat sheet - 300 free phone minutes a month. You can buy another 210 once those are gone, capping at 510. - Consideration for a nearer-release transfer. Consideration, not a transfer. But it is a real lever and it is worth asking about. - A financial achievement award or preferred housing for finishing an EBRR worth 100 hours or more. - Institution incentive events for finishing an EBRR under 100 hours. The phone minutes are the one families feel right away. Three hundred minutes is five hours of calls a month, and the difference between that and the standard allotment is the difference between a kid hearing from their parent weekly and hearing from them occasionally. Note that the 100-hour threshold counts EBRR hours. Productive activities earn credits at the same rate, but they do not feed that particular door. The short list - The fifteen programs that move a PATTERN item -------------------------------------------------------------- Out of 127 approved programs, this is the set that can actually touch your risk score. Four of PATTERN's fifteen items move because of programming, and these are the programs that move them. Education score - Bureau Literacy Program Drug program status - Residential Drug Abuse Treatment Program (RDAP) - Non-Residential Drug Abuse Treatment Program Program completions - BRAVE - Challenge - Life Connections - Mental Health Step Down - National Parenting from Prison Program - Skills - Sex Offender Treatment Program, residential and non-residential - STAGES - Drug Education, which is a productive activity rather than an EBRR. Work programs - Certification Course Training - Occupational Training - Vocational Training - Apprenticeship Training - Federal Prison Industries (UNICOR) Most of that middle group is residential, meaning a unit you live in at a facility that runs it, and most of those facilities are not camps or lows. Challenge runs at penitentiaries only. STAGES is at two places. Mental Health Step Down is at five, four of them USPs or medical centers. BRAVE is at six FCIs and it is written for younger people at their first designation, at the start of the sentence. So if you are headed to a camp or a low, the realistic list is shorter than the page makes it look: the two drug programs, the literacy program, parenting, and the whole work and training row. The work programs row is the one people underrate. An apprenticeship or a UNICOR (the better-paying prison work program) job moves a PATTERN item and pays you, badly, at the same time. The First Step Act, in plain English (part 3 of 3) federalprisondude.com/first-step-act The programs (continued) ======================== The trap - ACE courses are not FSA programs ------------------------------------------- Adult Continuing Education classes count toward the PATTERN program-completions item. They earn no FSA credits, because they are not on the approved list. People conflate these constantly and it is an easy mistake, because both of them are "classes" and both of them are good for you. One moves your risk score. The other moves your risk score and accrues nothing extra, because the accrual is on the calendar anyway. Take them. Just do not count them twice in your head. What is available in ACE is local, so the Education Department at your facility is the only place to find out what is on offer. Reading the entries - What each field means ------------------------------------------- Every program on the list carries the same set of fields, and a couple of them are worth translating. Cheat sheet - Credit hours. The program's weight, and the 100-hour incentive threshold. Not days off. - Needs addressed. Which SPARC areas it counts against. - Change needs. Whether finishing it can actually clear that need, or only address it. - Risk score impact. Whether it can move a PATTERN item. For most programs the answer is no. - Department. Who owns it. Psychology, Education, Chaplaincy, Recreation, UNICOR, Health Services, Women and Special Populations, Community Reentry Affairs, or Correctional Programs. - Authorized facilitators. Who is allowed to run it. This one is not bureaucratic trivia. - Institutions. All facilities, all facilities with designated women, or a specific list. - Residential. Whether it is a unit-based program you live in. The facilitator field exists so the class gets credited. If a well-meaning volunteer who is not on that list runs the group, the credit is at risk. Worth a polite question before you put 40 hours into something. The weasel words - "May be offered at all BOP institutions" ----------------------------------------------------------- That phrase is doing an enormous amount of work. It means the program is authorized there. It does not mean the program exists there. It does not mean there is a seat, and it says nothing at all about how long the waiting list is. The May 2026 revision changed the wording from "available at" to "may be offered at" for exactly this reason, which is the Bureau quietly conceding the point. > From the inside - Authorized and running are different words. > At my joint, half the catalog was theoretically available and a > fraction of it actually ran. There was one Psychology Services > staffer for the whole compound. You sign up, you go on a list, > and then you wait for a callout that may take a year to come. > The way people got into things was showing up, asking the > person who ran it directly, and asking again. Not the form. The > form goes in a pile. - Eighteen months, men's low Plan around what your facility actually runs, which you find out by asking people already in the program, not by reading the national list. The facility guide collects what I know per institution. The source ========== All of it traces to one document the Bureau reissues about once a year. Worth knowing what the last revision changed, and worth knowing the document contradicts itself in four places. The document - One PDF, reissued about once a year -------------------------------------------------- Everything in this guide comes out of the First Step Act Approved Programs Guide, published by the Bureau's Reentry Services Division. The version behind these pages is the May 2026 revision, and its introduction points at program statement (an official BOP policy document) 5405.01, First Step Act Assessments, Programming and Incentives, which is not one of the ones annotated here yet. Reentry Services updates it at least once a year. That cadence has a practical consequence nobody warns you about: the copy your unit team is working from may be older than the current one. Program names change, programs get added and dropped, and a staff member holding last year's printout is not lying to you, they are just out of date. If you get told something that contradicts what is here, ask which revision they are reading from. That question is polite, it is answerable, and it settles most of these arguments in one move. The changes - What the May 2026 revision changed ------------------------------------------------ Cheat sheet - Added: Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), currently only at FCC Butner. - Removed: Academic Success, and the CLEAR program. - Renamed: Resilience Support is now Veterans Resilience Support. - Rewritten: the Community Treatment Services description. - Clarified: Treatment Specialist is now Psychology Treatment Specialist in the facilitator lists. - Softened: every Available at became May be offered at. That last one is small on the page and large in practice. The Bureau changed the wording because authorized and running are not the same thing, and part four gets into what that means when you are the one on the waiting list. The errata - Four places the document argues with itself -------------------------------------------------------- Not a complaint, just a heads up, because two people reading the same PDF can walk away with two different numbers and both of them can point at a page. The summary matrix still lists Academic Success at 24 hours: the revision notes say it was removed, and it has no detail entry. Treat it as gone. The matrix says Resilience Support: the detail table says Veterans Resilience Support. Same program, two names. Women's Relationships II is 72 hours in the matrix: and 74 in the detail table. The matrix has a row called Exploration Series: that is a wrapped title. It belongs to Women's Career Exploration and is not a separate program. Where the two disagree, the detail table is the one with the facilitator lists and the institution codes, so that is the one this site follows. CLEAR appears nowhere in either table, which is consistent with it being removed. The other confusion - ACE courses are the one people get wrong -------------------------------------------------------------- Adult Continuing Education classes count toward the PATTERN program-completions item and earn no FSA credits, because they are not on the approved list. Both halves of that sentence are true at once and people keep dropping one of them. What ACE offers is set locally, so the Education Department at your facility is the only real source on what is running. The lane - What I know firsthand and what I do not -------------------------------------------------- I did eighteen months at a men's low. Programming at that level is what I actually know: the signup, the waitlist, the callout, what "may be offered at" turns into when there is one Psychology Services staffer for the whole compound, and how much of getting into something is asking the person who runs it rather than filing the form. The residential programs at mediums and penitentiaries are a different world. Challenge, STAGES, Mental Health Step Down, BRAVE. Those are real and I have described them off the document, not off living in one. Same goes for the women's programs, which are 30 of the 127 and which I have no business speaking to beyond what the Bureau published. Camps I did not do either. The security levels page is honest about which levels this site can speak to firsthand. The numbers on these pages are the Bureau's. Where I have added anything, it is about how the process runs, and it is marked. Corrections - Tell me when this goes stale ------------------------------------------ The next revision will move some of this. When it does, or when something here is simply wrong, send it in and I will fix it. That goes double if you are inside and something here does not match what your unit team is telling you. Those mismatches are the useful ones.