Category: Uncategorized

Posted 9/30/25

What You Need to Know About the First Step Act and Earned Time Credits

This is provided as general information and is not a substitute for advice from an attorney.

The First Step Act is a federal law that can help you serve less time in prison if you take part in approved programs. Here’s what you need to know:

What Are Earned Time Credits?

• Earned Time Credits (ETCs) are days off your sentence that you earn by completing certain classes, treatment programs, or work activities.
• You usually earn 10 to 15 days of credit for every 30 days you spend in approved programs.
• Credits start as soon as you begin serving your federal sentence.

How Do the Credits Help You?

1. Pre-release Custody
   
   • When your credits equal the time left on your sentence, you can be moved out of prison to a halfway house or home confinement.
2. Supervised Release
   
   • If you earn more credits than you need for early transfer, those extra credits can cut down your supervised release time.
3. Limits
   
   • Credits can’t shorten your sentence for time before you earned them.
   • If you are released and later sent back to prison, your old credits don’t carry over.

Who Can Earn Credits?

• Most federal prisoners can earn credits.
• You cannot earn or use credits if:
  
  • You were convicted of certain serious crimes (like terrorism, murder, child exploitation, or drug cases where death or serious injury was part of the conviction).
  • You have a final deportation order (immigration removal).
  • You are serving multiple sentences and one of them is ineligible.

What You Should Do

• Join programs right away: The sooner you start, the sooner you earn credits.
• Check your paperwork: Whether you qualify depends on your exact conviction, not just what happened in your case.
• Stay on top of your credits: The Bureau of Prisons sometimes makes mistakes. You may need to ask your lawyer for help if your credits aren’t being counted correctly.
• Watch for immigration issues: If you are not a U.S. citizen, a final deportation order can cancel your credits.

Key Takeaway

If you take part in approved programs, you can earn time off your prison sentence and maybe shorten your supervised release too. But not everyone qualifies, and the Bureau of Prisons does not always apply the law correctly. Work with your lawyer to make sure you get the credits you earn.

Using Artificial Intelligence in Criminal Defense

You have an officer on the stand who says he complied with department procedure when he seized evidence. When you searched your discovery, you don’t find any forms or reports completed by the officer.

You’re pretty sure that can’t be right, but the Buffalo Police Manual is 924 pages long and rabbit holes are dangerous in our line of work. But wouldn’t it be nice to list all the forms he should have completed that you don’t have?

Here’s an efficient and effective way to gather the information you need to confirm your hunch using AI:

Step one: Get a Google Notebook LM account. (https://notebooklm.google.com/) Start with the free plan. It’s fine for this. You can use your gmail account if you have one.

Step two: Find a copy of the Buffalo Police Manual of Procedures online. Here is one copy from 2022: https://www.bpdny.org/DocumentCenter/View/189/BPD-MANUAL-OF-PROCEDURES

Step three: Upload it to a new notebook in your new Notebook LM account. There is an option to simply link your notebook to the URL for the manual directly, but I got inconsistent and slower results when I did it that way.

Step four: In your Notebook, enter the prompt: “make a table of all forms an officer should use when he seizes property”

If you’ve done it right, the response should include about 14 or 15 forms, some of which you’ve never heard of and none of which were in the discovery provided by the prosecutor.

The results aren’t reliable enough to rely on blindly. For example, you should verify the results using the most up to date BPD manual available here:

https://public.powerdms.com/BuffaloCity/tree/documents/1890517.

But you have the citations and the sources that would have taken hours to gather on your own.

Here are some other prompts to consider:
“What records does an officer create when he seizes property?”
“When can an officer impound and tow a vehicle and what forms are completed when that happens?”

If you found this information helpful, share it all you like, take credit for it if you want. The point of this post is to share knowledge.

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