Getting Free Sooner With The First Step Act
One of the most common questions we get in our Facebook, Tiktok, and Instagram comments is about using First Step Act (FSA) credits towards supervised release.
Here’s the breakdown: you can use your first year’s worth of accumulated credits towards beginning supervised release, or to the door. To be clear, this is reducing your sentence of incarceration in a BOP facility.
To accumulate this year’s worth of credits, it takes approximately two years of programming as a minimum or low recidivism risk inmate. Your recidivism risk is based on your PATTERN score – a calculation made by the BOP based on several factors, including your demographics, the nature of your crime, your criminal history, and the number of FSA classes you’ve taken so far.
Once you’ve redeemed that first full year of credit towards the door, or to begin supervised release, the rest of the time credits are applied toward to reduce time spent in a prison, and instead spent in a halfway house or home confinement.
It doesn’t matter if this amounts to five or six years of additional credit. Once you’ve applied that first year to reduce your overall sentence, that’s it.
Unfortunately, that’s the way the law is written. It’s not an arbitrary BOP policy.