The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) announced the formation of its First Step Act (FSA) Task Force earlier this month to target moving more inmates from federal prisons to community placement, known as prerelease custody. The BOP is also maximizing bed-space in Residential Reentry Centers (halfway houses) for those in most need of these important reentry services. The initiative is part of fully implementing the FSA, which was signed into law by Donald J. Trump in December 2018 during his first term in office. BOP Director William Marshall III stated when the Task Force was announced that,
"Staff were taking the blame for delays they didn’t cause. They told me their systems weren’t always showing the right dates. Inmates and their families assumed they were ignoring my directive. That wasn’t true for the vast majority of our staff….But let me be absolutely clear – where we find that 1% who weren’t doing their jobs with integrity, we will find them and hold them accountable because accountability goes both ways.”
Rick Stover, Sr. Deputy Assistant Director Designation and Sentence Computation Center (DSCC), has had a distinguished career with the Bureau of Prisons (BOP). With over three decades of correctional experience, he understands the importance of what he calls "getting the ship turned in the right direction" regarding FSA. He draws from his years of experience as a case manager, correctional programs administrator in Washington, DC, and Warden at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. Stover was an active member of the committee responsible for selecting inmates for home confinement under the CARES Act. This act allowed the BOP to move inmates with underlying medical conditions to home confinement to mitigate the risks of COVID-19 in prison settings. As a result of the committee’s efforts, nearly 50,000 inmates placed on home confinement successfully completed their sentences without incidents. This outcome highlighted that alternatives to incarceration can be effective.
Stover, along with a team of over 30 analysts from the DSCC, is responsible for reviewing inmates eligible for home confinement or community custody under the First Step Act (FSA). This task force was formed due to ongoing issues with the Bureau of Prisons’ computer systems, which are struggling to accurately calculate FSA credits. Each month, eligible inmates can participate in programs to earn up to 15 credits, which reduce their sentences. While the maximum reduction is capped at 365 days, inmates serving sentences longer than 48 months can use these credits toward home confinement.
Since the implementation of the final rule outlining FSA guidance, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has struggled with accurately calculating the credits. The agency has focused on calculating the monthly credits without considering the projected date for earning all credits. As a result, inmates who could be placed in community halfway houses or home confinement end up staying in prison longer than necessary.
Prisoners I’ve spoken to about the Task Force have been confused by conflicting information about the FSA since it began. Case managers have struggled to understand how to combine the FSA with the Second Chance Act, a law signed by George W. Bush that allowed for up to a year of community placement. Former BOP Director Colette Peters strongly supported “stacking,” which combined the benefits of the FSA with the community placement offered by the Second Chance Act. However, the BOP couldn’t fully implement this due to capacity issues at halfway houses, as there was simply not enough room to accommodate inmates coming from institutions.
While Peters’ administration couldn’t move more inmates to halfway houses, they did provide calculations to estimate when an inmate could leave the institution for such placement. This created additional frustration, as case managers handling the paperwork often faced resistance from Residential Reentry Managers (RRMs) who coordinate community placements. As a result, inmates became frustrated with longer stays in prison, and this frustration persists today. Stover indicated,
“While the Bureau has made marked improvements in our time credit calculation applications since the onset of the FSA statute, more improvements are needed. We have changes forthcoming that will simplify the data for both staff and inmates.”
As part of the Task Force’s duties within the BOP, educating decision-makers at the Agency's 122 institutions is a priority. Stover has held meetings with wardens and regional directors to discuss FSA initiatives. Recently, video training sessions were conducted across the country to inform staff about the Task Force’s role and address questions. He noted,
"While training to wardens and other high ranking officials is great, the most significant training that we can provide is to the case managers who are on the front lines of this issue. If they understand how the calculations work, they can better explain the process to the inmates. Once the new time credit calculations take effect, our target audience to explain the updates will be the case managers throughout the Bureau."
Currently, the BOP is tackling these issues without an updated program statement, which serves as the rulebook for case managers overseeing FSA at the institutions. In the absence of this document, case managers have relied on internal memos and training to guide their work. FSA is just one part of their responsibilities, and numerous reports highlight staffing shortages, with case managers being reassigned to work as corrections officers due to inadequate staffing levels. Stover noted this policy is currently under review, and he is hopeful that expected changes to the policy can be adopted for the benefit of both staff and inmates.
The Task Force is starting with the evaluation of those who are currently in halfway houses that could be transferred to home confinement if the inmates received the full benefit of "stacking" recommended Second Chance Act placement to FSA time credits, consistent with Director Marshall's guidance last month. The Second Chance Act limits the amount of home confinement to 6 months (or 10%) from the end of the sentence, but the end of the sentence is a moving target for some inmates because they continue to earn FSA credits each month even when they are at the halfway house. The Task Force is manually calculating these dates for inmates in halfway houses, because the BOP’s own computer program currently does not calculate these dates once inmates are released from prisons into the halfway houses, although Stover indicated such calculations will occur with the recent application updates.
Once that is done, then the Task Force will turn their efforts to those currently in prison and there it will get complicated. There are inmates who have received dates to transition to halfway houses but case managers previously have not revisited those dates based on the new guidance from BOP Director William Marshall III. The reasons for this are clear, it is more work for case managers who are reluctant to do work they have already done. However, as a person who has seen prison from the inside, a small effort from someone at the BOP can have life altering effects on an inmate who deserves a second chance. Stover noted,
"As we manually calculate these dates and move inmates from the halfway houses to home confinement, we expect this to create a sizable number of open beds in many of our halfway houses across the country. This allows us to then revisit the placement dates for inmates currently in our institutions and increase the number of inmates that we can place in the community, and in many instances, allow inmates to get out of prison quicker to begin their transition to go home."
As the Task Force continues its work, some challenges persist. Unlike FSA credits, which are earned automatically, Second Chance Act community placements are discretionary and constrained by halfway house capacity. To date, the BOP has provided limited explanation to inmates about why they have not been granted full Second Chance Act placement and have offered little transparency on halfway house availability. Inmates are simply assigned a transition date with no additional details. Since placement is discretionary, pursuing relief through administrative remedies is often futile, and even taking the issue to court after exhausting remedies is unlikely to result in action. Stover said,
"The plan is to change this lack of transparency. Since Day One, Director Marshall's guidance has been clear. We have an obligation to staff, inmates, and their families to be transparent, up front, and honest. FSA is a complicated statute, and we have made mistakes in the past. We own those. Moving forward, we must do better. Moving eligible inmates from prisons to the community not only saves taxpayer dollars, but it is consistent with what was expected when the FSA statute was enacted in late 2018."
The BOP seeks to preserve the resources of its contracted halfway houses by prioritizing inmates who may need housing after lengthy incarcerations. While this is a reasonable approach, it results in many minimum-security inmates with sentences under 5 years — and stable home lives—being kept in institutional settings longer. At the same time, some inmates with homes are receiving extended halfway house placements, causing frustration and resentment among the broader inmate population.
The Task Force is working, but it is a monumental task to overcome years of problems.
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