Due surely to implementation of FIRST STEP earned-time credits, federal prison population drops by nearly 4,000 in one week
As noted in this prior post from last Thursday, the Department of Justice last week officially announced its new rule for “implementing the Time Credits program required by the First Step Act” and began awarding retroactive credits to those who were eligible and had already done the work to earn credits. In my post, I commented that, with the retroactive application of these credits, it would be interesting to see if the federal prison population (which as of Jan 13 BOP reported at 157,596 “Total Federal Inmates”) would start to decline.
A week later, on the first day that BOP updates here its reports of “Total Federal Inmates,” there is a dramatic change in the total federal prison population. Specifically, this morning BOP reports 153,855 “Total Federal Inmates,” a decline of 3,741 persons now federal inmates. This roughly 2.5% drop in the federal inmate population in one week is surely the result of the implementation of FIRST STEP Act earned-time credits, and it will now be interested to see if there are continued drops in the weeks ahead. (I suspect there will be as implementation must take more than just a week, though I will be very surprised if there are subsequent drops as large as this one.)
Among the notable parts of this story is that it represents a bi-partisan, multi-Congress, multi-administration achievement many years in the making. Of course, the formal law making this possible was the FIRST STEP Act which was enacted with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress in 2018 and which President Trump signed after he helped get to the bill to the finish line. But, well before that bill was passed, congressional leaders and the Justice Department during the Obama years had started drafting and building consensus around the prison reform elements of the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015 (first discussed here in October 2015). And now, of course, it is the Justice Department of the Biden Administration that finalized and now implements this important earned-time credits program required by the FIRST STEP Act.
Prior recent related posts: