Incarcerated Protesters Say Federal Prisons Refuse to Release People on Time

Earlier this month, more than 700 people incarcerated at a federal prison camp in Alabama refused to attend meals in protest of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons’ (BOP) failure to properly implement a law granting early release to prisoners who participate in programming, two incarcerated protesters told The Appeal. 

From Sept. 11 until dinner on Sept. 14, prisoners at FPC Montgomery, a minimum security prison camp in Alabama, refused to go to the chow hall for meals, two incarcerated protesters told The Appeal. Instead, they fed each other. 

“That was probably one of the most heartfelt things that I’ve ever seen is where you have about 30 people pulling food out of their lockers, from tuna fish to mackerel to peanut butter to mayonnaise to soups, and just throwing it all in there,” one protester told The Appeal. “They offered so the next man could eat.”

(The Appeal is not publishing his name to protect him from retaliation.)

The prisoners were protesting alleged violations of the First Step Act (FSA), a 2018 criminal legal system reform law that lets federal prisoners shorten their sentences by obtaining Earned Time Credits, which allow earlier release dates for some who participate in programming, such as therapy or drug treatment programs. 

“We’re just requesting that we get given what, by law, has been written,” the protester said. 

In response, prison officials threatened to transfer 600 men out of the minimum security prison to “the worst prisons in the United States,” another protester, who declined to give his name because he feared retaliation, told The Appeal. Frightened, the men went to the chow hall on Sept. 14 for dinner. 

A BOP spokesperson confirmed that on Sept. 11 “numerous incarcerated individuals” at Montgomery remained in their housing units during lunch. 

“As a precautionary measure, the institution had been placed on modified operations status,” he told The Appeal in an email. “FPC Montgomery employees carefully monitored the situation, and the facility returned to normal operations on Monday, September 16, 2024.” 

The calculation of Earned Time Credits has been automated since 2022 and occurs every 30 days, he said. Approximately 70,000 federal prisoners are eligible for the credits, according to the spokesperson. 

“When errors occur, (miskeyed or missing info that the calculator relies on), the Unit Team works to find and correct the data issue so that the time credits can be appropriately computed,” he told The Appeal. 

But while the demonstration has ended, advocates say the underlying issues remain. And they’re not limited to Montgomery. 

“Everything has gone wrong with the implementation of the Earned Time Credit program,” Alison Guernsey, director of the Federal Criminal Defense Clinic at Iowa College of Law, told The Appeal. 

People convicted of certain offenses—including homicide and sexual abuse—cannot participate. But the BOP often misclassifies people as ineligible, said Guernsey, who has litigated several cases challenging the agency’s classifications. 

If a person overcomes that first hurdle and is deemed eligible, BOP uses a risk assessment tool to estimate the likelihood they will commit another offense after their release. Depending on classifications, people can earn either 10 or 15 days off their sentences for every 30 days they participate in programming.

Facility case managers largely implement the FSA—a system that appears to be rife with errors and abuse.  

“This is an endemic problem,” Susan Beaty, a staff attorney with the advocacy nonprofit California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, told The Appeal. “It’s happening at the BOP facilities all over the country. My sense is that BOP doesn’t take seriously their obligations under the First Step Act.” 

Beaty says many of her clients are women who were formerly incarcerated at FCI Dublin, a shuttered, scandal-plagued prison that operated in Northern California. She said those detainees “have been impacted by FSA issues, including failure to adequately or accurately calculate FSA credits, and then failure to apply those credits in a timely manner.” Beaty also said some women have been held for months past their release dates. Dublin staff had sexually abused incarcerated women at the facility for years, which led to lawsuits, congressional investigations, and the facility’s closure in April. 

Lydia Lavrova, a law student in Guernsey’s clinic, told The Appeal that they have heard reports of case managers repeatedly changing a person’s eligibility.

“They’re directly responsible for determining a baseline eligibility and then how many credits people are earning,” she said. “They’re just not trained to do that. And when they are trained, they can also lash out and do it vindictively.”

The Montgomery protesters told The Appeal that case managers are largely hostile toward their clients. 

“They’re the ones that give us more time,” said the protester who declined to provide his name to The Appeal. “Let’s say you’re getting out in two weeks and you give them a problem, all of a sudden your halfway house was full, and you’ve got to stay here another seven months.” 

Federal public defender Patricia Richman said it’s common for the BOP to refuse to release someone if they can’t find a bed in a residential reentry center, also known as a halfway house, but “that’s not the law.”   

“A lot of people could go to home confinement, and BOP just seems to be ignoring that,” she told The Appeal.  

In July, BOP director Colette Peters confirmed during a congressional oversight hearing that the agency delays release due to an inadequate number of halfway house beds.

Some federal prisoners have taken the BOP to court and argued their release should not depend on bed space. The lawsuits point to the text of the FSA, which states the federal agency “shall”—not may—”transfer eligible prisoners” into “prerelease custody or supervised release.” 

Courts have not ruled consistently on this point. 

In May, Kansas’s sole federal court district ruled the BOP must transfer eligible prisoners to prerelease custody or supervised release and that “no such condition concerning bed availability is included among the requirements.” But in August, another federal judge ruled that the BOP has discretion to determine a person’s placement. He found that courts do not have the authority to review the agency’s “determinations of whether to release a prisoner to an RRC  [Residential Reentry Center] or home confinement.”

Despite the pervasive need, federal prisoners typically do not have appointed counsel in these proceedings, which means help is “not accessible for a lot of people,” said Richman. Prisoners have largely been left to advocate for themselves—through protests, like the one at Montgomery, or in the courts.  

“These are people who have hundreds of hours reflecting diligent work and programming,” said Richman. “It is really unjust to withhold its benefits, especially when the law is plain, but the challenge here is enforcing that.”