Back in the general population, I met my bunkmate and tried to keep to myself while I waited for dinner.  A few inmates made it a point to say hello.  One very friendly guy named Jorge kept telling me how quickly my time will go.  “It’s crazy!” he kept telling me, with a big smile on his face.  “It’s crazy!”  He was also the first inmate who asked me a question which I would hear repeated over and over again until my time as an inmate was finally completed:

“What’s your out date?”

I didn’t know what that meant, and even if I had known, I wouldn’t have known the answer yet.  But that question was on the lips of everyone I met.  “What’s your out date?”  “What’s your out date?” 

I have since learned that this sort of question is completely out of bounds in any higher-security facility.  But when you are somewhere which offers the Residential Drug and Alcohol Program (RDAP), it’s all anybody cares about.

This is the way it works: in the Federal system, you’re sentenced to a specific number of months.  You’re then credited with an assumed 15% off due to good behavior and good conduct.  You can lose that time off, but you’re given it in advance as far as computing your estimated release date.  That estimated release date is your “out date.”  You might be released from prison before then, but only if you’re sent to a halfway house.  Time spent in the halfway house counts as time in prison, because you are still under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Prisons.  But the “out date” is the day you are estimated to no longer be under their jurisdiction.  Most Federal inmates still have to serve a term of “supervised release” (known as “paper” among the inmates, which is overseen by the Probation Department). 

Generally, you never ask another inmate how long they’ll be incarcerated, because it’s the last thing they want to think about.  The only way to make it through a sentence of even a moderate length is to live day by day, build a routine, and let the days turn into weeks, and the weeks turn into month.  If you think about the time, you’ll go crazy.  Or if not crazy, at least you’ll be constantly miserable.

However, in an RDAP facility, your “out date” is priority number one.  That’s because there is always a waiting list for inmates to be admitted into the drug program, and that list is ordered based on who is going to be released first.  It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been an inmate, and it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been on the waiting list.  What matters is how much time you have left.  A new class of inmates is selected every two months, and they then begin the nine-month drug and alcohol program.  As each class of twenty to twenty-five inmates is chosen, those qualifying inmates with the shortest amount of time left on their sentence get in…the rest have to wait.


The reason this is so important to people is that you can receive up to a year off of your sentence for successful completion of the program (although if you “violate” in any serious way while in the halfway house, you have to serve the time off that you earned, and you’re sent back to a prison facility).  But how long you ACTUALLY get off is determined by how much time you have left when you graduate.  For example, let’s say you have an “out date” of January 1, 2010.  Regardless of your sentence length, for completing the program you are eligible for six months in the halfway house (instead of the standard 10% of your sentence UP TO six months).  As in most cases being in the halfway house is preferable to prison, that’s a good thing.  Anyway, if you completed the program with no time off your sentence, you’d be eligible to go to a halfway house around July 1, 2009.  How much time off you receive in addition to that depends entirely on when you graduate the program.  If you graduate on June 1, you’re saving about a month.  If you graduate on March 1, you’ve saved four months, and so on, up to a year.  So the idea is to get into the drug class as quickly as you can…the sooner you get in, the sooner you graduate, the more time you get off your sentence, and the faster you get home.

What happens in one of the RDAP facilities is that everybody makes it their business to stick their nose into everybody else’s business.  As the time for a new class to start approaches, they’ll run around, collecting information, trying to figure out if they’ll make it into the next class or not.  The nervousness grows, the tension builds, and anxiety becomes overwhelming.  Some of these inmates are trying to hold their family situation together, working feverishly to get their wife or girlfriend to stick by them and wait until they get home.  So it isn’t uncommon for promises to be made; “I’m going to be home by July.  I promise!”  But if the inmate doesn’t make it into the next class, those promises instantly become broken. 

If you promise your wife and kids that you’ll be coming home, and suddenly it looks like it will be another two (or four) months, that can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  An inmate may find out he’s got an empty house to come back to…or no house at all.

I learned all of this later on.  Having just arrived, and not understanding anything going on around me, all I could do when people asked me about my out date was say “I have no idea.”  Not surprisingly, that was met with a great deal of skepticism by some of the inmates who approached me.  They’d look suspicious, and sometimes almost hostile, as if I had some secret I refused to share…a secret which could stand between them and their freedom.  No wonder it takes a while to settle in!

(Watch for Part Four in a week or so)