Timing RDAP With First Step Act In Mind
RDAP is the Residential Drug Abuse Prevention Program that’s offered at several federal prisons across the country.
If you’re eligible, completion of the RDAP program can give you a sentence reduction of one year. However, if you have a relatively short sentence, a situation can arise when calculating your First Step Act benefits and your RDAP benefits in which you are actually better served not enrolling in RDAP at all.
Why? Because if your First Step Act (FSA) release date occurs before you could possibly complete RDAP, which is a nine-month program, you will have to finish RDAP regardless of your FSA conditional release date.
This is because the FSA requires inmates to be compliant in programming to earn their credits. If an inmate voluntarily enrolls in RDAP and then decides to withdraw, they will be put into “opt-out” status, which effectively “turns off” their FSA benefits until they complete their programming.
If an inmate has good rapport with their case manager, there have been cases in which inmates can discuss this situation and be unenrolled without affecting their FSA benefits, but these cases are rare and should not be taken for granted.
For these reasons, if you have a 60-month sentence or less, we often don’t recommend taking RDAP – unless you can enroll immediately upon walking onto federal prison grounds.
If you have questions or need help with any of these matters, give our team a call during our posted business hours: 407-434-0175.