Earning credits and applying them are two different things

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.

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.

What you earn, and what it is not based on

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. 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.

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.

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 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) or home confinement. 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.

Good time and FSA credits are different things

Good conduct time is 54 days a year for everybody who stays out of trouble. It comes off the sentence itself and the DHO 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.

What this adds up to

The strategy that falls out of all this is boring, and it is correct.

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.

Hand the rest of this site to your family

You will not be able to look things up once you're inside. They can, and this is where: everything written for the one waiting: a twelve-part guide to mail, visiting, money, and your release date, plus their own FAQ and checklist. Alongside it, a guide to every facility with email alerts when visiting stops, the support group directory, calculators for your release math, and free answers when they have questions.

Send them the link before you report, not after they can't reach you.

Somebody is programming hard and losing credits anyway. Send it to them.