Federal Sentencing Reduction: Compassionate Release and First Step Act
Congress passed the First Step Act in 2018 to give federal prisoners a pathway to earlier release through earned time credits and expanded compassionate release. The promise was simple: if you rehabilitate yourself in prison or face extraordinary circumstances like terminal illness, you can petition for release. Seven years later, the Bureau of Prisons denies 84% of compassionate release motions - and that 16% approval rate is being celebrated as progress.
The system isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed.
Mr. Mahoney wanted to die at home. Prison medical staff supported his compassionate release request. The warden supported it. His family supported it. The federal judge who originally sentenced him - the person who PUT him in prison - reached out to the BOP Director to support the motion. The BOP Director never responded. Mr. Mahoney died days later, handcuffed to a hospital bed, with an armed correctional officer standing guard while he took his last breath. That's not a broken system. That's a system showing you what it actually values.
At Spodek Law Group, we represent people navigating federal sentencing reduction motions, and we've seen the gap between what the law promises and what the Bureau of Prisons actually delivers. The gap isn't an accident. If your facing a federal sentence or trying to secure early release for someone incarcerated, understanding how the system actually works - not how its supposed to work - can mean the difference between freedom and dying in custody while your motion sits in bureaucratic limbo. Todd Spodek and our team have spent years fighting these battles, and what we've learned is this: the pathways to freedom exist on paper, but the BOP has spent years building gates across every single one.
What The Law Says vs What Actually Happens
The First Step Act and 18 USC 3582(c)(1)(A) create two main pathways to early release: compassionate release for extraordinary and compelling reasons, and earned time credits for completing rehabilitative programs. On paper, these look like real opportunities. In practice, there designed to preserve the original sentence.
Heres the compassionate release process the statute describes: you file a request with your warden, the BOP has 30 days to respond, and if they deny it or dont respond, you can file a motion in federal court. Simple, right? The statute even says you've "exhausted administrative remedies" after 30 days. But here's what actualy happens - wardens figured out they can deny your request immediately, which forces you to appeal through the BOP's Regional Office, then Central Office, before you can file in court. That 30-day pathway the statute created? Its a trap. By the time you finish appealing through BOP hierarchy, four to six months have passed, your medical condition has worsened, and the "extraordinary and compelling" reason you had six months ago might not even matter anymore because your dead.
The numbers prove the system isn't designed to grant release. In fiscal year 2024, federal courts decided 2,901 compassionate release motions. Only 467 were granted. That's a 16.1% approval rate - or an 84% denial rate, depending on weather you want to sound optimistic. In fiscal year 2025 through the second quarter, courts decided 1,381 motions: 210 grants, 1,171 denials. The denial rate held at 84.8%. When your dealing with terminal illness, family emergencies, and people who've served decades beyond what similar offenders serve today, an 84% denial rate isn't bureaucracy - its policy.
The BOP itself denies 85-90% of compassionate release petitions before they even reach a judge. Between 2014 and 2017, the BOP approved only 6% of 5,400 applications. During that same period, 266 applicants died while waiting for a decision. Let that sink in: 266 people died in federal custody while the BOP decided weather they were sick enough to die at home.
OK so you might be thinking, "but the First Step Act changed that in 2018, right? Now prisoners can file directly in court." True. And the denial rate is still 84%. The only thing that changed is WHO does the denying. Before 2018, the BOP denied almost everyone. After 2018, federal judges deny almost everyone. The pathway to freedom opened just wide enough to let hope in, but not wide enough to let people out.
The Documentation Trap Nobody Mentions
To prove your too sick for prison, you need medical records from prison doctors. But the Bureau of Prisons controls which tests your allowed to have, which specialists you can see, and weather prison medical staff will document the severity of your condition accurately. Your asking your jailer to prove you should be released. How do you think that goes?
At Federal Medical Center Carswell in Texas - a prison hospital specifically for women with serious medical conditions - 349 women filed compassionate release requests in early 2020 as COVID spread through the facility. The warden denied or ignored 346 of those requests. That's a 98.9% denial rate at a facility literally designed to house medically vulnerable prisoners. Marie Neba was 56 years old and dying of cancer. She fit the statutory criteria for compassionate release: terminal illness, not a danger to the community. The warden denied her petition.
Heres were the documentation trap gets worse. Even when prison doctors document that your terminally ill, the BOP can bring in there own medical reviewers to dispute the prognosis. In one documented case, prison doctors said the inmate had less than six months to live. The BOP's reviewers disagreed - they claimed he had more than 18 months. The BOP issued a denial based on that disputed timeline. The inmate died two days later. Two days. The BOP's medical reviewers were off by 18 months and 28 days, and that man died in custody becuase of it.
You cannot get the medical documentation the BOP requires using only the medical resources the BOP provides. You need outside specialists to verify what prison doctors are saying. But your in prison - you cant schedule appointments with outside oncologists or cardiologists. You cant get second opinions. You cant access the diagnostic tests that would definitively prove your condition. The BOP set up a documentation standard that's impossible to meet from custody, then denies your petition for "insufficient medical documentation."
Even judges who want to grant release face this problem. The statute requires the court to find "extraordinary and compelling reasons" for release. But what counts as extraordinary and compelling? The U.S. Sentencing Commission has guidelines, but courts interpret them differently. Some circuits say rehabilitation alone isn't enough. Some say terminal illness with less than 12 months to live qualifies. Some say terminal illness isn't enough if the BOP can provide treatment in custody - even when "treatment in custody" means letting you die slightly more comfortably behind bars. There's no uniform standard, which means your medical condition might qualify for release in one circuit but not another, depending on were you were prosecuted and incarcerated.
Think about that. Weather you get to die at home or handcuffed to a prison hospital bed depends not on how sick you are, but on which federal circuit has jurisdiction over the prison were your incarcerated. That's not a legal standard. That's a geographic lottery.
Why The Bureau of Prisons Says No (Even When Judges Say Yes)
Mr. Mahoney's case proves that even judicial support doesn't matter. He filed for compassionate release to die at home. The prison medical team supported it. The warden supported it. His family supported it. The federal judge who sentenced him - who had the authority to impose the sentence in the first place - reached out to the BOP Director's office to express support for the motion. The BOP Director never responded. Mr. Mahoney died in federal custody a few days later, still handcuffed to his hospital bed with an armed guard standing nearby. When your so sick that your physically incapable of escaping, they still keep you shackled. When the judge who put you in prison says you should be released, they ignore it. Why?
Becuase the BOP has institutional incentives to deny releases. The Bureau's budget requests to Congress are based partly on prison population numbers. More prisoners = larger budget justification. Releasing people early shrinks the population count, which makes it harder to argue for maintaining or increasing funding. Between 2006 and 2011, the BOP approved an average of only 24 compassionate release requests annually from a population exceeding 200,000 inmates. Twenty-four. Out of two hundred thousand. The institutional incentive is to keep people locked up, not let them go.
And then there's liability. Every person released early is a potential risk - what if they reoffend? What if they fail to report to supervised release? What if the public or media criticizes the BOP for releasing someone who then commits another crime? From the BOP's perspective, the safest decision is always to deny. If you die in custody, that's unfortunate but defensible. If you get released and commit a new offense, that's a scandal. The incentive structure is clear: err on the side of denial.
Irwin Schiff learned this the hard way. He was 87 years old with less than two years remaining on his sentence. His son Andrew spent more than two years trying to obtain compassionate release. Denied. When Andrew said goodbye to his father at a federal medical facility, Irwin was unconscious, on a respirator, and still handcuffed to the hospital bed. An armed correctional officer stood guard nearby. Irwin Schiff died shackled to a bed at 87 years old because the BOP's institutional incentives favored keeping him in custody over letting him die with dignity at home.
The judges who grant the 16% of compassionate release motions that succeed aren't ignoring these incentives - there overruling them. And when judges do grant release, the BOP often appeals or finds procedural ways to delay implementation. Because from the Bureau's perspective, even a judge's order is just another bureaucratic step to navigate around. The system isn't broken. Its working as designed - to keep people locked up unless the legal and public pressure becomes overwhelming.
The First Step Act's Broken Promise
In 2018, Congress passed the First Step Act with bipartisan support. The promise was clear: federal prisoners who complete rehabilitative programs - educational courses, vocational training, substance abuse treatment - would earn time credits toward earlier release. The statute uses mandatory language: prisoners who complete qualifying programs "shall" earn credits. Not "may." Shall. That's Congress telling the BOP this isn't optional.
Seven years later, the BOP still hasnt gotten the calculation right. The agency has issued multiple internal memos, changed methodologies, created a "First Step Act Task Force" in June 2025 to "speed up the process," and still - STILL - people are sitting in federal prison past there legal release dates because the BOP cant figure out how to count credits. Defense attorneys aren't exaggerating when they say the BOP treats mandatory credits as discretionary. The ACLU filed a class action lawsuit in 2025 on behalf of thousands of prisoners who should have been moved to community confinement but remain in custody because the BOP designated the credits as "discretionary" rather than mandatory.
Heres were it gets infuriating. The statute says earned time credits can be applied to earlier placement in prerelease custody or supervised release. Simple enough. But the BOP has spent years arguing about what "applied to" actually means. Can the credits shorten your prison term? Can they only be used for halfway house placement? What happens to leftover credits if you've already served enough time for prerelease? Different federal circuits have ruled differentley, creating a circuit split that might end up at the Supreme Court. The Fourth Circuit says credits can apply to supervised release. The Third Circuit says leftover credits remain unused. The Ninth Circuit sided with inmates in Gonzalez v. Herrera. The Eleventh and Fifth Circuits ruled the other way.
So weather you get to use the time credits you earned depends on which circuit has jurisdiction. Not on weather you completed the programs. Not on weather you rehabilitated yourself. On geography. Your sitting in a federal prison in Alabama (Eleventh Circuit), and you've earned 400 days of credits - but those credits might not apply the same way they would if you were incarcerated in California (Ninth Circuit). The law is supposedly uniform, but the application varies by 500% depending on were your locked up.
