It’s All About The Programming

On Friday October 4, 2024, every active Federal Prison in the country was supposed to have a town hall meeting to address two issues. The first issue is the conditional placement/conditional release tool. The other is a new phone policy that goes into effect on January 1, 2025. The blanket free 510 minutes per month, that every phone eligible inmate in the country has had since March 20, 2020, is ending, in lieu of this new policy.

The official press release can be read below and downloaded here.

Basically it’s like this, the First Step Act actually allows any inmate to “program” however only eligible inmates may redeem their credits for time off of their sentence and additional RRC placement (home confinement and halfway house). Inmates ineligible to redeem Federal Time Credits (or earned time credits) may get other incentives as outlined in the First Step Act which include: “preferred housing” (whatever that means), extra commissary and extra phone minutes. (read the whole FSA here).

The new phone policy addresses those phone minutes. It works like this, if your inmate is participating in programming, regardless if they can redeem earned time credits or not, they will get 300 FREE phone minutes per month. They will then be able to purchase 200 additional phone minutes at a rate of $.06 (6 cents) per minute. If they are NOT programming they can purchase 300 minutes. It’s that easy. Program and get the free minutes.

Below is the press release