Time and release

If you are earning FSA credits, assume about sixty percent of the sentence imposed.

That is a planning number, not a promise. The time calculator does it properly with your actual sentence, jail credit, and PATTERN level.

Good conduct time is for everyone. FSA credits are earned by completing programming and come off the back half of your sentence. They stack.

The mechanisms differ in a way that matters. Good time is 54 days a year, taken off the sentence itself, and you keep it unless the DHO takes it. First Step Act credits do not shorten the sentence — they move you into prerelease custody sooner, meaning halfway house and home confinement, with up to a year of them applied toward the supervised release date.

They also come with a gate that good time does not have: your PATTERN score has to be minimum or low for the credits to be applied at all. Score yourself here before you count on them.

It is on your paperwork. Get your sentence computation from your case manager and keep a copy.

It probably is not. Check it anyway, because when it is wrong nobody else is going to find it.

Jail credit is where it usually goes sideways. If you sat somewhere before you were designated, confirm every day of it appears.

The halfway house is where you serve the end of your sentence, and getting more of it is the single highest-value thing you can do inside.

The short version: the referral is supposed to happen at a program review well before your release date — the Bureau's own window is seventeen to nineteen months out — nothing happens unless someone asks, and the cost of a late referral falls entirely on you. Raise it at your first team meeting.

What the place is actually like once you get there is in getting out, and it surprises people.

Not your case manager, though they make the recommendation. The referral goes up with the warden's signature and placement depends on the facility having space.

Yes. You can also angle toward a particular area by changing your listed release address to one closer to it.

If you have camp points, no sex offense, and you were designated to a low anyway, the Bureau most likely just wants to see six months of behavior before moving you. Bed space is the other common holdup.

Anyone who offers to sell you a camp placement is selling you nothing. That one has its own page.

You had better have a substance abuse problem documented before you went to prison. That is the gate.

It is worth it. RDAP is the only program 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 you are earning. PS 5330.11 is the policy.

If you have a real history and it is not documented, get it into the record before sentencing. That is the window, and it closes, because the PSR cannot be amended afterward.

If you do not have one, you do not qualify. Building a history that does not exist means putting false information into a federal record, and it tends to create a bigger problem than the one it solved.

Do not bother, and do not listen to anyone who says they can get it for you.

The people selling “case reviews” and motion templates to families are running a known pattern, and there is a whole page on it. If you have a real claim, you need a real lawyer, not a packet.

Do not bother, and do not listen to anyone who says they can get it for you.

It exists, the criteria are narrow, and the process starts with a request to the warden rather than with a payment to a consultant. PS 5050.50 is what it actually requires.