The release date

Not the date on the locator. That is their projected release date from Bureau custody, and it is not when they walk through your door.

Their halfway house date is the one that matters, and the gap between the two can be many months. Nobody publishes it, nobody volunteers it, and it is the number this entire section exists to get you.

The time calculator will do both numbers if you have their sentence, their jail credit, and their PATTERN level.

Good conduct time is 54 days a year off the sentence imposed, for everyone, kept unless a disciplinary hearing takes it.

FSA credits are earned by completing programming. They do not shorten the sentence — they move them into prerelease custody sooner, which means halfway house and home confinement, with up to a year of them applied toward the supervised release date.

They stack. The catch is that their PATTERN risk score has to be minimum or low for the credits to be applied at all, and you can score them yourself.

It is the Bureau's arithmetic on their sentence — the raw term, jail credit, good time projected and earned, and every date that falls out of it. It is the source document for everything anyone tells you about when they come home.

You cannot request it. They can, from their case manager or the inmate kiosk, and they can mail you a copy. Ask them to, and ask again after every team meeting, because it changes.

Keep them all. A stack of computations with dates on them is how you catch an error, and it is the only way you catch one.

It usually is not, and it is worth checking anyway, because when it is wrong nobody else is going to find it.

Jail credit is where it goes sideways — time they sat somewhere before designation that never made it onto the sheet. Compare the computation against their judgment line by line.

If it is wrong, they raise it with their case manager in writing, and if that goes nowhere it becomes an administrative remedy under PS 1330.18. Release date errors are one of the few things the remedy process genuinely fixes.

A residential reentry center — a contracted facility in the community where they serve the end of their sentence, works a job, and is subject to sign-in, curfew, and testing.

It is where they stop being in a prison and is not yet home, and getting more of it is the single highest-value thing either of you can do. It is also stricter than almost anyone expects.

You ask, on a schedule, and you write down every time you asked.

Policy contemplates the referral going in roughly seventeen to nineteen months before their projected release date. Count backward from their date, put that window in your calendar, and start calling their case manager before it opens rather than after. Ask two specific questions: when is the referral scheduled, and what length is being recommended.

Nothing happens until someone asks, no metric attaches to anyone doing it on time, and the entire cost of a late referral lands on them. Two points of pressure — their and yours — work better than either alone. The full push.

Not their case manager, though they write the recommendation, and that recommendation is the thing you are actually influencing.

The referral goes up with the warden's signature, and then the actual placement depends on the halfway house having a bed. A generous recommendation into a full facility still gets you a short stay, which is why the timing matters as much as the number.

Usually as well as, rather than instead of. The common shape is halfway house first, then home confinement for the last stretch, with the total governed by their credits and the statute.

Straight to home confinement happens and it is not the default. It needs an approved residence, which means the address work starts months ahead and whoever lives there has to genuinely agree, including to an officer arriving unannounced.

The Residential Drug Abuse Program. It is the only thing in the system that takes real time off the end — up to a year for eligible inmates with a nonviolent offense — on top of everything else they are earning.

The gate is a documented substance abuse problem in the year before their arrest, verified against their PSR. If it is real and it is not in the report, that has to be fixed before sentencing, because the PSR cannot be amended afterward. If it is not real, they do not qualify, and manufacturing a history means putting false information into a federal record.

An immigration detainer disqualifies them from the early release even if they complete the program. PS 5330.11 is the policy.

Honestly, almost certainly not, and this is where families lose the most money.

Direct appeal and a 2255 motion are their lawyer's territory, they are narrow, and they rarely succeed. Compassionate release exists with genuinely narrow criteria and starts with a request to the warden, not a payment to a consultant. Anyone who contacts you promising a reduction is running a known pattern, and you should read that page before you speak to them again.

Here is the part worth hearing. The sentence is fixed. Their release date is not. Halfway house placement, First Step Act credits, and RDAP are worth months and sometimes more than a year between them, they are free, and they respond to exactly one thing: somebody asking on time and writing down that they asked. That is the lever you actually have. Use it instead.