The Early Release Provision: How to Reduce Your Sentence By 95%

Introduction

You have been indicted for violating federal or state law, convicted of the charge, and sentenced by the judge.  What should you do now? If you are like me, your thoughts have immediately turned to getting out of prison as soon as possible.  What I did about my situation, however, was try to escape by building a hang glider.  That turned my situation from bad to worse.  I was given a new charge, convicted, and had years added to my already lengthy federal sentence.  Further, I lost two months of good-time credit. I was placed in the Bureau of Prisons’ (BOP) two-hour watch program, and I was sent to a federal penitentiary (maximum security) for ten years.  Within hours of my arrival at the penitentiary, two guys were murdered.  We spent months on lockdown.  You do not want to follow my example.  Trust me on this!

I was a first-time offender when I first entered federal prison many years ago.  I did not know the law or the fact that there were a number of ways that I could legally reduce my sentence.  Back then, before the Supreme Court of the United States decided the case of United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005), we were told that the United States Sentencing Guidelines were mandatory and that the only way to reduce a federal sentence was to cooperate with the Government.  A great many federal defendants did not cooperate.  But because we did not know that early release opportunities existed, we simply did our time.  Mostly, this was due to the fact that there were no lawyers or prisoners advising us about possible early release programs.  Nor were there any books that one could read and learn how to apply for early release.  Therefore, I followed the route that many jailhouse lawyers pursued.  I began studying federal law in the prison’s law library.  Then I attacked my conviction and sentence in federal court.  I filed a motion to vacate my conviction and sentence pursuant to Title 28, United States Code, section 2255.  The results were predictable given my lack of legal knowledge and the one-year time limit I had to file my claims.  My §2255 motion was denied.

After that denial, I made the conscious decision that if I could not get relief for myself, I would at least help as many other prisoners as possible get the relief that they deserved.  That became my motivation.

Through the years, my education and legal knowledge grew.  I earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from West Virginia University.  Later, I earned a Paralegal diploma from Blackstone Career Institute and a Paralegal certificate from Adams State University.  In addition, I succeeded in overturning an array of convictions and reducing the sentences of many prisoners.

But as the years wore on, I began to notice two disturbing facts.  First, I noticed that more and more of the new people who were entering federal prison had never dealt with the federal criminal justice system.  A person would come into the system without a clue as to how he or she should proceed with his or her case.  In this regard, these new prisoners were experiencing the same problem that I faced when I first came into the system in 1994.  As a result, the period for filing a §2255 motion had usually expired by the time the person came to me for help.  I cannot count the number of times that someone has approached me seeking assistance and I would find that the person had valid claims, but that the person had allowed his one-year limitation period to elapse.  Usually, any §2255 motion that I filed on such a person’s behalf was denied by the district court as untimely.  The second fact that I noticed was that the trial courts were granting less and less relief.  It became almost impossible to overturn a conviction in the federal courts.  Even when the facts and law supported the prisoner’s case, the court would routinely take years to decide the issue and most often, only after the person had already completed his or her sentence.

These combined factors eventually caused me to start searching for other ways to reduce a person’s prison sentence.  Through my research, I was able to uncover a number of early release opportunities that were available to federal and state prisoners.  I then began helping prisoners implement these early release strategies.  For example, I met a prisoner named Troy while we were at the federal penitentiary in Jonesville, Virginia.  Troy had been given a 10-year mandatory minimum term of imprisonment, to be followed by 5 years of supervised release, as the result of a drug conspiracy conviction.  This was his first federal sentence, though he had previously done time in county jails.  Troy was basically in shock when I first met him because he never believed that he would get so much time, especially given the fact that the police had not recovered any drugs in his possession.

At his first unit team review, his case manager gave him a copy of his sentence computation form.  This form showed that he was eligible for about 500 days of good-time credit.  Using this form and a Good Time Table, I was able to explain to Troy that if he kept out of trouble and participated in various programming activities, he would essentially reduce his sentence to 8 years, 8 months.  I also explained to him that he was eligible for up to one-year off his sentence if he completed the Residential Drug Abuse Program, known as RDAP.  That information lit a spark in him.

Over the next three years, Troy took every class that was offered at the prison, completed the 40-hour drug treatment program (non-RDAP), and worked at the prison’s UNICOR factory.  When his security points dropped, he was transferred to a medium security prison which had the 500- hour residential drug program.  Fortunately, we were able to keep in contact with each other with the assistance of his sister.  Troy completed RDAP and earned one year off his sentence.  Troy’s situation became even more interesting with the passage of the Second Chance Act in 2008.  That law gave Troy and other prisoners an opportunity to be eligible for up to one-year of halfway house placement.  (With the passage of the First Step Act in 2018, some federal prisoners now earn years of halfway house placement or home confinement).  When Troy was 19 months from his release date, I wrote him a Second Chance Act memorandum for him to present to his unit team.  He subsequently received 11 months of halfway house placement.  Thus, Troy served a total of 6 years, 9 months behind prison walls.  Stated another way, Troy served only 67.5% of his time in federal prison—when the average federal prisoner was serving 85% of his or her time in federal prison.  I was later able to reduce Troy’s term of supervised release by nearly 80%.

After years of successfully helping prisoners like Troy reduce their sentences, I decided to write a series of books to make the information available to anyone who is entering or has entered the federal or state criminal justice system.  It is my fervent hope to make as many people as possible aware of the opportunities that they may not have known about or even considered.  Indeed, if I had known about these opportunities when I first entered the system, my federal time would have been a whole lot different—and shorter.

Each book in the series is packed full of proven methods that have allowed federal and