Free — no charge, no card, no catch
Congress told the Bureau of Prisons to house people as close as practicable to their primary residence, and within 500 driving miles where practicable. Most families never ask, because nobody tells them they can. Fill in the form below and we'll prepare the request for you — free.
Section 601 of the First Step Act amended 18 U.S.C. § 3621(b). It directs the Bureau of Prisons to place a person “in a facility as close as practicable to the prisoner's primary residence, and to the extent practicable, in a facility within 500 driving miles of that residence” — subject to bed availability, security designation, programmatic needs, medical and mental health needs, faith-based requests, the sentencing court's recommendations, and the Bureau's other security concerns.
The statute also directs the Bureau to consider a transfer closer to home even for someone already inside the 500-mile radius, subject to those same factors and the person's own preference about whether to move.
This has nothing to do with earned time credits. A great many people are excluded from earning First Step Act time credits because of their offense. The closer-to-home placement provision is separate — it is about where the Bureau houses you, not about shortening the sentence, and it does not depend on time-credit eligibility.
In September 2025 the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General audited the Bureau’s compliance with this requirement, covering everyone in BOP custody on September 28, 2024. The OIG found that approximately 41 percent of the inmates it evaluated were housed more than 500 driving miles from their primary residence.
A second finding in that report matters just as much. The Bureau was not measuring driving miles at all. It used straight-line distance — as the crow flies — which makes every distance look shorter than the drive actually is. By the Bureau’s own method the figure was 33 percent; measured the way the statute requires, it was about 41 percent. The OIG found the undercount affected more than 8,600 people, and that the progress reports sent to Congress carried the same error.
The OIG also pulled a sample of 100 placements and asked the Bureau to justify them. In 26 of those 100 cases it could not determine why the person was placed where they were — and in some, there were comparable facilities significantly closer to home. Bureau designators suspected bed space or security concerns, but nothing in any Bureau system documented the decision.
Some groups fare far worse than the average. The OIG reported that 69 percent of Native American inmates and 51 percent of the Bureau’s female population were housed more than 500 miles from their release residence.
Read the OIG audit yourself (PDF) — Report 25-083, Audit of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Efforts to Place Inmates Close to Home, posted September 25, 2025. Don’t take our word for any of it; every number above is in that document.
A request costs nothing to make. It goes to the Unit Team on a standard Inmate Request to Staff form — what everyone inside calls a cop-out. The hard part isn't the form. It's knowing the provision exists, and writing the request so it addresses the factors the Bureau actually weighs.
Be straight with us and we'll be straight with you
This is a document preparation service. You give us the facts; we put them into the Bureau's standard form and a continuation page, properly organized. We do not evaluate the case, advise on strategy, or tell anyone what to file.
Nobody can promise a transfer, and we don't. Designation and transfer decisions belong to the Bureau of Prisons, and the statute makes the closer-to-home preference subject to bed space, security level, programming, medical needs, and the Bureau's other concerns. A well-written request improves the odds that the request is properly considered. That is all anyone can honestly offer.
The person in custody submits it, not you and not us. A cop-out is an internal Bureau form handed to staff by the incarcerated person. We email you the completed PDF; you print it and mail it in; he signs and dates it and gives it to his Unit Team. Keep a copy of everything.
Everything marked required is needed for the form to make sense to a Unit Team. The rest makes the request stronger. It takes about four minutes.
The PDF is built on this device. Print it, mail it to him, and have him sign and date it before handing it to staff — an unsigned cop-out gets handed back.
After you send it
A cop-out is the informal first step. If it's denied or ignored, the next route is the Bureau's Administrative Remedy Program — the BP-9, BP-10, BP-11 sequence — which has its own deadlines at every stage.
That's paperwork we prepare too. So is the underlying case work — § 2255 and § 2241 petitions, compassionate release, First Step Act time-credit disputes. Start with a free case review and we'll tell you honestly what's worth doing, including when the answer is nothing.
Request a Free Case ReviewSources
We don’t ask anyone to trust a statistic on a website. Every figure and every legal proposition above comes from one of these two documents. Both are free to read and download.
