The First Step Act of 2018 has been called “the most significant criminal justice reform bill in a generation.” As part of the act’s reforms, Congress sought to encourage inmates’ efforts in rehabilitation by rewarding those efforts with the measurable, predictable reduction of time spent under restrictive federal control. To that end, the act created “time credits” that defendants may earn by participating in rehabilitative programming. The act directed that those credits “shall be applied toward time in prerelease custody or supervised release.”
However, the Sixth Circuit majority construed the relevant statutory provision to allow time credits to be used only to accelerate release from prison. Under this view, prisoners may not apply time credits to reduce the time they will spend in prerelease custody or on supervised release.
With the help of counsel from Gibson Dunn, Cato filed a brief joined by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the Rutherford Institute, and the Law Enforcement Action Partnership urging the Supreme Court to review and reverse the Sixth Circuit’s decision. Proper application of the time-credit provision is exceptionally important. Most federal sentences do not end at the prison gates. Instead, the overwhelming majority involve prerelease custody, supervised release, or both—periods that follow incarceration and continue to impose concrete constraints on liberty.
Shortening the duration of these ongoing restraints for individuals who have earned time credits accords with the First Step Act’s purposes. The act was designed to better balance public safety with liberty, including by aligning punishment more closely with rehabilitation and ensuring that demonstrable rehabilitative success yields predictable, sentence-wide benefits.
The panel’s erroneous interpretation also undercuts another of the act’s aims: reducing the public costs of mass incarceration and supervision. By decreasing incentives to participate in rehabilitative programming and by prolonging periods of prerelease custody and supervised release, the adopted approach increases correctional expenditures directly through longer federal supervision. It also increases costs indirectly. The Sixth Circuit’s approach will lead to more reoffenses—and thus more public money spent toward dealing with the consequences, including prosecution, incarceration, and supervision. It should be reversed.