How to use this library
Each guide on this site names its authorities inline — a statute section, a regulation part, a program statement number. This page is where those names resolve: the document, what it governs, and where to read it free. The canonical access points: uscode.house.gov for statutes, ecfr.gov for regulations, bop.gov/resources/policy_and_forms.jsp for program statements, ussc.gov for Sentencing Commission materials, and gao.gov and oig.justice.gov for the oversight reports.
The verification habit we teach: when any page here (or any consultant, or any prison-yard rumor) tells you a rule, find the rule. Reading the actual text of 18 U.S.C. §3632(d)(4) takes ten minutes and settles arguments that folklore sustains for years. Families who develop the primary-source reflex stop being customers of information and start being auditors of it — including auditors of us, which is the point.
The statutes: where every right on this site lives
Title 18, the criminal code, holds the machinery. §3632(d)(4): FSA time credit earning, rates, and the offense exclusion list. §3624: good conduct time at subsection (b), prerelease custody at (c) (the Second Chance Act text), and FSA credit application at (g). §3621(b): designation, the 500-mile provision, and the no-judicial-review sentence; §3621(e): the RDAP reduction. §3582(c): compassionate release at (c)(1)(A), retroactive amendment reductions at (c)(2). §3583: supervised release, with early termination at (e)(1). §3585(b): prior custody credit.
Title 28, the judicial code, holds the remedies: §2241 (habeas — execution of sentence), §2255 (motion attacking the sentence, with the one-year limit at (f)), and §1654 (the right to proceed pro se). The First Step Act of 2018 — Public Law 115-391 — is the amending statute behind the modern versions of most of the above and is worth reading in its own right for context.
The regulations and program statements: how the agency runs it
The Code of Federal Regulations translates statute into procedure. 28 C.F.R. Part 523: the FSA time credit rules — the January 2022 final rule that defined earning status and successful participation. Part 542: the Administrative Remedy Program — every BP deadline our remedies guide teaches is printed here. Part 541: the discipline program behind our DHO guide. Part 540: correspondence and visiting.
Beneath the C.F.R. sit the program statements — BOP’s public operating manuals. The ones this site leans on hardest: PS 5100.08 (security designation and custody classification — the point tables and Public Safety Factors), PS 5330.11 (RDAP), PS 5267.09 (visiting), the remedy program statement implementing Part 542, and the FSA Approved Programs Guide listing every credit-earning program. All are posted at bop.gov; citing them by number in filings is the advocacy move our guides teach throughout.
Sentencing Commission materials
The U.S. Sentencing Commission’s documents govern two territories this site covers. USSG §1B1.13, the compassionate release policy statement, amended effective November 2023 to define the modern extraordinary-and-compelling grounds — medical, age, family circumstances including incapacitated parents, victim-of-abuse, unusually long sentences, and other reasons — that our guide tracks precisely. Amendment 821 and its retroactivity materials: the status-point and zero-point-offender changes behind the current wave of §3582(c)(2) motions.
The Commission also publishes the retroactivity impact analyses, the guidelines manual itself, and — invaluably for expectations — data reports on how courts actually rule on compassionate release and retroactive motions, by circuit and by ground. All free at ussc.gov, and all part of how our guides distinguish what the law allows from what typically happens.
Oversight and accountability reporting
The documented record of BOP implementation problems — the factual backbone of this site’s auditing premise — comes from the oversight bodies. The Government Accountability Office has published repeated reviews of First Step Act implementation, risk-assessment (PATTERN) validation, and BOP staffing and operations. The DOJ Office of the Inspector General has issued management alerts and reports on BOP institutional operations and FSA rollout. Both publish free, searchable, and citable — and both are quotable authority in administrative filings when a family’s individual error mirrors a documented systemic one.
The journalism layer matters too, and we credit it: Walter Pavlo’s reporting at Forbes has chronicled the FSA computation failures, conditional-placement-date confusion, and halfway-house bottlenecks in real time with practitioner-level accuracy, and the team at Prisonology — former BOP case-management professionals — has documented the calculation errors from inside expertise. Advocacy organizations including FAMM and FWD.us publish the family-cost and policy research our framing draws on, including the widely cited findings on what incarceration costs the households left behind.
Case law: how we use the courts’ work
Our guides describe settled doctrinal architecture — Estelle v. Gamble on medical care, Wolff v. McDonnell on disciplinary due process, Strickland v. Washington on ineffective assistance, the exhaustion doctrine around §2241 — and we name the anchor cases so readers can find them. What we deliberately do not do is catalog circuit-by-circuit splits as if a static page could keep them current, or tell any reader how doctrine applies to their facts — the first would be unreliable, the second would be legal advice.
For readers who want the cases: published federal decisions are free at the courts’ own sites and through CourtListener and Google Scholar, and PACER holds the dockets our docket guide teaches families to read. Where a guide flags an issue as circuit-contested — FSA eligibility interpretations being the standing example — that flag is itself the citation: it means the answer for your person lives in your circuit’s current decisions, which is research the filer does or a question for counsel.
Our methodology, stated as a checklist
Every guide is built the same way: (1) primary sources first — statute, regulation, program statement — read in current form at the official source; (2) implementation reality layered on from oversight reports and credible practitioner journalism; (3) plain-English translation that keeps the citation trail intact; (4) honest uncertainty flagged where law is contested or practice varies; (5) review-dated, with substantive updates noted; (6) corrected publicly and promptly when readers or events prove us wrong — the process our about page describes.
And the standing invitation: audit us. Every claim on this site is designed to lose an argument with its own primary source — if you find one that does, contact@getmydaysback.com gets it fixed. A site teaching families to verify the government’s math has no business being unverifiable itself.