The Half-Step Act

I promised a blog on the First Step Act... And, truth is, I've been wanting to write on this subject since my fellow inmates & I excitedly watched the FSA's announcement (with great fanfare)--only to see its implementation become just another lip-service broken promise by the BoP, DoJ & the rest of the usual suspects.

Thousands upon thousands of inmates were released after the FSA was signed, according to the (shallow) reporting of most mainstream news outlets. (Please bear in mind that the FSA only affected *federal* prisoners, a small fraction of the 2.3 million Americans behind bars.) Fact is, the vast majority of those 'early releases' resulted from the FSA's restoration of *one week per year* of 'good conduct time'--which inmates were already supposed to be getting, *by law.* It's the first topic I want to address, because it provides a pretty good insight into the institutional culture within the BoP and DoJ, one that works diligently to keep as many people behind bars as possible, regardless of reason.

I'll try to keep this short. In the '70s, Congress legislated 'good conduct time' for prisoners, to encourage good behavior, and set it at a paltry 15%--most states do 25%, 33%, 50%, or even more. Anyway, the 15% equates to 54 days per year, barely enough to make your average convict work hard enough (and kiss enough ass) to stay out of trouble in an environment where there's a hundred cops around for every thousand prisoners--all with their own idea of what the many rules & regulations mean. BUT, the BoP felt that even 54 days was too much for us ungrateful scumbag prisoners, and came up with some tricky math to knock it down to 47 days, or 12.5%. (It's complicated, but basically, they decided to only apply the 15% time off to the 85% of time left *after* they deduct the 15% credit...circular, ridiculous logic, but there you go.) Prisoners complained, and took it all the way to SCOTUS, but the Highest Court in the Land ruled against the convicts (big surprise there), saying the BoP has the leeway to interpret the law as it sees fit.

So, it took forty-odd years, but Congress finally clarified what was obviously its intention all along--and *that* was the one provision in the FSA that's had by far the most impact on prisoners.

Big whoop. (And, the BoP dragged its feet for *9 months* just calculating people's extra weeks, meaning a lot of guys I knew who were eligible to leave still couldn't, because they hadn't got their updated sentence sheets yet.)

Second thing the FSA did: It made 'retroactive' the Obama-era Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the 100:1 disparity for dealers of crack cocaine relative to regular cocaine (which made no damn sense in the first place...thanks, Biden!). Good stuff, but it should've been in the original bill. Anyhoo, it didn't matter much anyhow, as most of the guys who this provision affects, I soon saw, wound up being backlogged by the courts (they had to apply to their sentencing judges for the releases). Out of the about 20 guys in my prison who were affected, *one* had actually got his release by the time I left. The rest were told crap like "the judge has decided to consolidate all these cases, and won't rule on the releases until they're all together, at some point in the future." And the few guys whose judges did allow releases? The DoJ immediately started filing suits questioning their eligibility, trying to get them all locked back up again.

So, as for the second major FSA proviso? A resounding 'meh.'

As far as the already-incarcerated go, the third and final major FSA provision promised to have the most impact. The idea, simply stated, is inmates can earn early release times to halfway houses, by participating in educational, vocational and anti-drug programs. Which sounded great to us inmates, who all rushed out to sign up for such programs--only problem being, there weren't any. In the 18 months I served after the FSA passed, the BoP still hadn't gotten around to identifying which of their few current programs would qualify, or for how much time--much less started any new ones. From the guys I still keep in touch with, there has been little further progress since then, and nobody has earned a single day of the promised early-release time. *Plus,* it's worth remembering that this earned time is supposed to be in the form of longer halfway house placements--but the halfway houses are already overcrowded and backlogged, after a wave of closures in 2016/2017. It's not clear to anybody how that's gonna work, transferring more people to halfway houses that are already short on bedspace, whenever the BoP finally does get around to providing the necessary programs.

And...that's about it, for the First Step Act. Sure, it did a few other good things, most notably reducing mandatory minimums for a couple thousand future prisoners annually by 20% or so. And it supposedly made compassionate release (for dying people) and home confinement transfers easier--but the BoP set an impossibly high bar to qualify for that stuff. (I personally scored *two levels above* the required 'Minimum Recidivism/Danger Risk Level'--and the most violent thing about my case was an old BB gun the cops found in my closet after they arrested me. I knew *not one person* who qualified as 'Minimum.')

In the end, the FSA was a huge disappointment, especially to the guys behind bars for whom meaningful criminal justice & prison reform is a literal life-and-death matter. And moreover, the few half-assed provisions that might have been impactful were pretty much entirely blunted by an institutional culture within the BoP and DoJ that just *hates* to see prisoners released. I doubt we'll see any real change until that entrenched bias is addressed.

If you wanna read more, there's a reasonably even-handed article here: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/what-first-step-act-and-whats-happening-it