An Associated Press report suggested that previous attempts by the Bureau of Prisons to change Residential Drug Abuse Program (RDAP) exclusion policies had stalled in negotiations with the union representing federal correctional workers. The implication was that those negotiations prevented the Bureau from closing a legal loophole that allowed convicted terrorist Mohamed Bailor Jalloh to receive early release.

That implication is incorrect and misrepresents how federal law governing RDAP actually works.

Congress granted the Bureau of Prisons full authority over RDAP sentence reductions in 18 U.S.C. § 3621(e)(2)(B), which states that an inmate’s sentence “may be reduced by the Bureau of Prisons” by up to one year after successful completion of the program. The statute places that decision squarely within the Bureau’s discretion.

The Bureau’s own regulation implementing that authority, 28 C.F.R. § 550.55, explicitly states that eligibility determinations are made “as an exercise of the Director’s discretion” and allows the Bureau to categorically exclude entire categories of inmates from early-release eligibility.

The United States Supreme Court confirmed this authority in Lopez v. Davis (531 U.S. 230), holding that the Bureau of Prisons may exclude entire groups of inmates from RDAP early release based on policy and public safety considerations.

In other words, the Bureau of Prisons already possessed full legal authority to determine which inmates could or could not receive RDAP early release.

The decision to approve Mohamed Bailor Jalloh’s early release was made through the Bureau’s own classification and legal review process. The Council of Prison Locals does not review inmate cases, does not determine RDAP eligibility, and does not approve or deny sentence reductions. Those decisions are made exclusively by the Bureau of Prisons under the authority granted to it by federal law.

Federal labor law requires agencies to bargain over the impact and implementation of management decisions that affect employees. RDAP eligibility rules concern inmate programming and sentencing reductions; they are not inmate release decisions made by union representatives.

Suggesting that union negotiations somehow caused or enabled an inmate’s release ignores the statutory framework governing RDAP and shifts responsibility away from the agency that actually holds the legal authority to make those decisions.

Eliminating union protections for more than 30,000 federal correctional workers did not close any loophole in federal sentencing law. It simply removed workplace protections from the staff responsible for operating the nation’s federal prisons while the real public safety crisis—an understaffed and under-resourced federal prison system—continues to go unaddressed.

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