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The clock is not a figure of speech

Compassionate release exists for people who are running out of time. That is literal. The criteria turn on terminal illness, on conditions that will not improve, on age and deterioration.

Which means the months a request spends being rewritten, resubmitted, or refused for a reason nobody explains are months that do not come back. That is the real cost of getting this wrong, and it is why families call us later than they wish they had.

Start A Compassionate Release Review
or call 1-800-382-0868

Whatever you send becomes the record

Somebody who will never meet your loved one decides from a file, and what is in that file is whatever your family put there.

It does not disappear if the answer is no. It follows the matter forward — to the next reviewer, or to an attorney picking this up later. A request written in a hurry does not simply get refused. It becomes the version of the story everyone after reads.

The BOP rewrote its compassionate release policy

The Bureau of Prisons replaced its compassionate release policy — and most of what's written about it online hasn't caught up, and some of it now describes routes that no longer exist.

Two grounds were removed. Requests based on the death or incapacitation of a child’s caregiver, and on the incapacitation of a spouse or registered partner, are no longer criteria.

The terminal illness standard moved. There is no longer a fixed life-expectancy figure. Eligibility turns on a terminal, incurable disease with an end-of-life trajectory, assessed under the Bureau’s clinical guidance — the disease, the prognosis, other serious conditions, and the degree of functional impairment.

That matters more than it sounds. When a bright-line number is replaced by clinical judgment, the medical record does the work.

The age criteria moved too. One route is 65 or older, having served the lesser of ten years or 75 percent of the sentence, with serious deterioration in physical or mental health from aging. The other is 70 or older with at least 30 years served.

Grounds were also added, including infectious disease outbreaks and public health emergencies, sexual abuse by staff or contractors, and physical abuse resulting in serious bodily injury.

And if a request is already pending, the current policy does not say what happens to it.

Find Out Where You Stand
or call 1-800-382-0868

Four things decide it

None of them are how much your family cares.

The medical records. Not whether your loved one is sick. Whether the records prove it the way this review needs it proved. Those are two different things, and most families find that out too late.

The release plan. This gets looked at hardest, and families put it together last.

The questions nobody answered. The offense. The time left to serve. Whether release is safe. These get weighed whether or not your request says anything about them.

Old rules. A request written to the old ones is already behind.

Why families bring us in

Because none of the above is obvious from inside it, and there is usually one chance to get it right.

We know which documentation carries weight and which does not. We build the release plan to the standard the review applies rather than the standard families assume. We track the rules as they change — that's the job.

We have worked with federal and state inmates since 2006, in all 50 states.

Some people who call us don’t need us. We’ll say so.

“The prison did nothing to help him or other inmates and you got him home where he is safe. Thank you from our whole family. We will never forget your help.”

Ruby, New York

If your loved one is in state prison

State rules are nothing like the federal rules, and they differ from one state to the next. Some states have a compassionate release process and some do not. Where it exists it may be called medical release, medical parole or geriatric parole, it may be decided by a parole board rather than a warden, and the thresholds differ.

So the first question is not what to write. It is whether your state has a route at all, and which programs your loved one actually qualifies for.

That is what the first phase of our State Sentence Reduction program does. We send a questionnaire, you provide the sentencing documents and any medical information, and we research what your state offers and what your loved one appears to qualify for — compassionate release among it, where that state has it. You receive a written summary of everything we find.

Before any of that, call and tell us the situation. We will tell you whether it is worth doing in your case, and that conversation costs nothing.

What we do not do

We are not attorneys and we do not present ourselves as any kind of substitute for one.

We do not file anything with a court. We prepare the administrative request and the material behind it. If the matter proceeds to court, that is your attorney’s work.

We do not contact the prison or the board on your behalf.

We do not guarantee an outcome. Nobody honestly can.

Start A Compassionate Release Review
or call 1-800-382-0868