The Supreme Court yesterday upheld the method used by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to determine the amount of good time inmates get. The BOP gives inmates 54 days good time for each year they serve. Michael Gary Barber and Jihad-Black filed suit saying that they should get 54 days off for every year of the sentence. This can be a significant difference since due to the good time inmates serve they may spend significantly less time in prison than their sentence. This is particularly true on long sentences.

The Federal sentencing statute states:

A prisoner who is serving a term of imprisonment of more than 1 year … may receive credit toward the service of the prisoner’s sentence, beyond the time served, of up to 54 days at the end of each year of the prisoner’s term of imprisonment, beginning at the end of the first year of the term … . Credit for the last year or portion of a year of the term of imprisonment shall be prorated and credited within the last six weeks of the sentence.

The majority opinion agreed with the BOP. It ruled that since the statute says that the good time days are given at the end of the year it has to be based upon time served. Otherwise prisoners would be getting time off after they were released.

Justice Kennedy in dissent gives the statute a very literal reading. He states:

Consider the Court’s example of a prisoner subject to a ten-year sentence. . .The sentence is divided into ten 365-day segments. Each segment constitutes a year of the term. The prisoner will spend the first 365 days behind bars. In the statute’s words, he has reached “the end of the first year of the term.” Now is the time for credit to be awarded, and he may receive up to 54 days if sufficiently well behaved. Because he has already completed a full year of his term, those credits go toward completion of the next year. If, based on good behavior, he has earned the maximum of 54 days, he would need another 311 days behind bars before the second year of his term of imprisonment is at an end (because 54 + 311 = 365). If he has earned fewer than 54 days, a longer incarceration will be required to reach 365. Regardless, once the prisoner reaches the end of the second year of his term, he will again be eligible to receive good time credits.

On a ten year sentence the inmate would get 63 more days good time than under the BOP procedure. This would not only give the inmates more reason to behave but would provide millions of dollars in tax savings to the taxpayers