Elderly Offender Home Detention

By Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., and Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA

What is elderly offender home detention?

It is a pilot program under 34 U.S.C. § 60541(g) that lets the Attorney General place certain older or terminally ill federal prisoners on home detention until the expiration of the prison term — not for the six months that ordinary prerelease home confinement allows. Eligibility requires being at least 60 years old and having served two-thirds of the sentence imposed, among five further conditions. It is discretionary, it is small, and the statute’s authorizing period reads “fiscal years 2019 through 2023.”

Key takeaways on elderly offender home detention

• This is a different authority from ordinary home confinement. § 3624(c)(2) caps prerelease home confinement at 180 days or 10 percent of the sentence, whichever is shorter. This program can run “until the expiration of the prison term.”
• The statute lets § 3624 be waived. § 60541(g)(1)(C) authorizes the Attorney General “to waive the requirements of section 3624 of title 18 as necessary.”
• Age 60, and two-thirds served — plus five more statutory conditions, three of which are Bureau determinations.
• Good conduct time does not count toward the two-thirds. BOP: the calculation “does not include the application of Good Conduct Time.”
• No crime of violence, sex offense, terrorism offense or espionage offense — current or prior.
• You can go straight home. BOP confirms approved participants “may be transferred directly from the institution to home confinement” without a halfway house first.
• Apply within six months of eligibility. BOP: applications “made earlier than that date will be returned.”
• The authorizing period is an open question. The statute says the pilot “shall be carried out during fiscal years 2019 through 2023”; BOP still publishes the program. Ask the unit team whether the institution is accepting applications.

Is the program still authorized? The honest answer

This is the question every other page on this subject skips, so we will take it directly.

What the statute says. 34 U.S.C. § 60541(g)(3), “Scope of pilot program”: the pilot “shall be conducted through Bureau of Prisons facilities designated by the Attorney General as appropriate for the pilot program and shall be carried out during fiscal years 2019 through 2023.” Paragraph (4) then directs the Attorney General to “report to Congress concerning the experience with the program at the end of the period described in paragraph (3).”

Whether it has been extended. We checked whether § 60541 has been amended since. The current version carries an effective date of 21 December 2018 — the date of the First Step Act, which expanded the program — and is current as of 12 July 2026. We located no subsequent amending public law extending the authorizing period.

What BOP still publishes. The Bureau’s First Step Act FAQ, read on 2 September 2026, continues to describe the “Second Chance Act Home Confinement Pilot program,” lists it among the ways “an inmate may obtain early release or additional community custody time,” sets out its eligibility criteria, explains the two-thirds computation, and gives instructions on when to apply.

What we could not read. That same FAQ points to BOP’s operating instrument for the program, an Operations Memorandum at bop.gov/policy/om/001-2019.pdf. That link returns HTTP 404, as of 2 September 2026. We could not retrieve the document, so we cannot say what authority the Bureau currently records itself as operating under.

So what should a reader do with that? Not assume either answer. The practical step is specific and takes one page: submit an Inmate Request to Staff to the unit team asking whether the institution is currently accepting applications under the elderly and terminally ill home detention pilot, and if not, on what basis. A written answer is worth more than any inference, and it creates a record if the answer turns out to be wrong.

The elderly and terminally ill home detention pilot: authority, eligibility, and the two-thirds computation

Question	Answer	Source	As of
What authority?	34 U.S.C. § 60541(g) — a pilot program, expanded by the First Step Act	Statute	Effective 21 Dec. 2018
How long can the placement run?	“[U]ntil the expiration of the prison term to which the offender was sentenced”	§ 60541(g)(1)(A)	Same
How is that possible under § 3624?	The Attorney General “is authorized to waive the requirements of section 3624 of title 18 as necessary”	§ 60541(g)(1)(C)	Same
Is the authorizing period open?	The statute says the pilot “shall be carried out during fiscal years 2019 through 2023.” No later amending public law located. BOP continues to publish the program	§ 60541(g)(3); BOP FSA FAQ	Statute current as of 12 July 2026; FAQ read 2 Sept. 2026
Minimum age?	60	§ 60541(g)(5)(A)(i)	Same
How much must be served?	Two-thirds of “the term of imprisonment to which the offender was sentenced”	§ 60541(g)(5)(A)(ii)	Same
Does good conduct time count toward it?	No. “This is calculation does not include the application of Good Conduct Time”	BOP FSA FAQ	Read 2 Sept. 2026
When to apply?	“[W]hen they are within six months of eligibility”; earlier applications “will be returned”	BOP FSA FAQ	Same
Halfway house first?	No. Approved participants “may be transferred directly from the institution to home confinement”	BOP FSA FAQ	Same
Who can request it?	Either the Bureau or the offender — “upon written request from either the Bureau of Prisons or an eligible elderly offender or eligible terminally ill offender”	§ 60541(g)(1)(B)	Same
What happens on a violation?	“[R]emoval of that offender from home detention and the return of that offender to the designated Bureau of Prisons institution”	§ 60541(g)(2)	Same

Who qualifies: the seven statutory conditions

Most pages state two of these. The statute contains seven, and every one has to be satisfied. From § 60541(g)(5)(A), an “eligible elderly offender” is an offender in Bureau custody:

1. “who is not less than 60 years of age”;
2. “who is serving a term of imprisonment that is not life imprisonment” based on conviction for offenses that “do not include any crime of violence (as defined in section 16 of title 18), sex offense (as defined in section 20911(5) of this title), offense described in section 2332b(g)(5)(B) of title 18 [federal crimes of terrorism], or offense under chapter 37 of title 18 [espionage and censorship], and has served ⅔ of the term of imprisonment to which the offender was sentenced”;
3. “who has not been convicted in the past” of any federal or state crime of violence, sex offense, or other offense described above;
4. who has not been determined by the Bureau — “on the basis of information the Bureau uses to make custody classifications, and in the sole discretion of the Bureau” — to have a history of violence or of conduct constituting a sex offense or other listed offense;
5. “who has not escaped, or attempted to escape, from a Bureau of Prisons institution”;
6. for whom the Bureau has determined that release “will result in a substantial net reduction of costs to the Federal Government”; and
7. “who has been determined by the Bureau of Prisons to be at no substantial risk of engaging in criminal conduct or of endangering any person or the public if released to home detention.”

Conditions 4, 6 and 7 are the ones to notice. They are not tests a reader can apply to themselves — they are Bureau determinations, one of them expressly “in the sole discretion of the Bureau.” A person can satisfy the age and time requirements exactly and still be denied, and the denial will not necessarily be explained in terms a reader can argue with. That is the honest shape of this program.

Whether an offense counts as a crime of violence for these purposes runs through the same categorisation machinery that governs other early-release routes; that analysis is on our offenses that preclude rdap page.

The terminally ill route

There is a second door, and it has no age or time-served requirement at all. Under § 60541(g)(5)(D), an “eligible terminally ill offender” is one serving a sentence for offenses that do not include a crime of violence, sex offense, terrorism offense or chapter 37 offense; who satisfies conditions 3 through 7 above; and who “has been determined by a medical doctor approved by the Bureau of Prisons” to be either:

• “in need of care at a nursing home, intermediate care facility, or assisted living facility, as those terms are defined in section 1715w of title 12”; or
• “diagnosed with a terminal illness.”

Two things follow. First, the assessment must come from a doctor the Bureau approves — an outside specialist’s letter supports the request but does not satisfy the clause on its own. Second, the “need of care at a nursing home… or assisted living facility” limb is not a terminal diagnosis requirement. Someone who needs that level of care but is not dying can fit the definition, and that is a genuinely under-used provision.

Where the diagnosis is terminal, a motion for compassionate release under 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A) is the parallel route and is decided by the sentencing court rather than the Bureau. The two are not alternatives so much as different decision-makers, and where time is short both are usually worth pursuing.

The two-thirds computation, and why it disappoints people

This is where expectations break, and the arithmetic is worth stating carefully because it runs the opposite way from everything else in the early-release rules.

The statute requires that the person “has served ⅔ of the term of imprisonment to which the offender was sentenced.” Note what is being measured: the term imposed by the court, not the term as reduced by credits.

BOP’s own FAQ answers the question directly: “An inmate is considered eligible for the elderly offender/home confinement program if he/she has served 2/3 of ‘the term of imprisonment to which the offender was sentenced.’ This is calculation does not include the application of Good Conduct Time.”

That is the reverse of how good conduct time works everywhere else. Good conduct time moves the release date earlier; it does not move the elderly-pilot eligibility date earlier. Someone earning the full 54 days a year reaches two-thirds of the sentence imposed not long before their projected release date — which is why the eligibility date and the release date can be much closer together than a family expects, and why applying early is pointless.

A worked example, on a hypothetical sentence, to show the method. Take a 120-month sentence. Two-thirds of 120 months is 80 months of actual time served, measured against the sentence imposed. With full good conduct time at 54 days for each year of the sentence imposed, the projected release date arrives at roughly 85 percent of 120 months — about 102 months. So the elderly-pilot eligibility date sits around 80 months and the projected release date around 102 months, leaving a window of roughly 22 months in which the program could operate. This is arithmetic illustrating the method, not a prediction, and it is not a substitute for the Bureau’s own computation. The way to check any individual case is to obtain the sentence computation sheet and work from it — our prior custody credit page explains how to read one, and bop sentence computation covers what to do if it is wrong.

Prior custody credit does count toward time served, since it is credited against the sentence under 18 U.S.C. § 3585(b) rather than added to a projection. That is a distinction worth confirming against the computation sheet rather than assuming either way.

Applied Insight — Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA, Managing Director: The most common disappointment here is the person who has been counting toward this program using the projected release date rather than the sentence imposed, and discovers with a year to go that eligibility arrives much later than they thought. The second most common is applying too early: BOP says applications made more than six months before eligibility “will be returned,” and a returned application is not a decision — it is a delay. Work out the two-thirds date from the sentence imposed, diarise six months before it, and use the intervening time for the part that actually takes time: the residence, the medical documentation, and the release plan.

The mandatory consideration nobody is told about

There is a provision in BOP’s own policy that changes how this program should be approached, and we have not seen it stated anywhere else.

Program Statement 5241.01, Management of Aging Offenders — agency policy, not law — dated 14 April 2022 and still listed as current on BOP’s Inmate and Custody Management policy index as of 2 September 2026, provides at § 10:

“All offenders who are within 6 months of their 60th birthday must be considered under the Elderly Offender Program and the appropriate referral made to the Residential Reentry Management Branch as described in the First Step Act of 2018 and policy.”

Read that carefully. It is not permissive. On its face it imposes a mandatory consideration duty triggered by age alone — within six months of turning 60 — with a referral to the Residential Reentry Management Branch. It does not say the person must first meet the two-thirds test; it says they must be considered.

That has two practical consequences. First, it is something to ask about by name. A written request to the unit team referencing PS 5241.01 § 10 and asking whether the required consideration has occurred, and what the referral said, is a specific ask against a specific policy provision — the kind that produces an answer. Second, it is a data point on the authority question above. As of April 2022, the Bureau was describing the Elderly Offender Program as an operating program with a mandatory referral trigger. That does not resolve what happened after fiscal year 2023, but it is more than nothing, and it is worth putting in front of a case manager who says the program no longer exists.

A note for reviewers: PS 5241.01’s own reference list cites “P5325.07 Release Preparation Program (8/15/19),” while BOP’s current index lists PS 5325.09 dated 22 June 2026. Stale internal cross-references are common across the Bureau’s policy library and are worth checking before relying on any of them.

The other duty in the same policy: an annual compassionate-release screen

PS 5241.01 § 7 sets out how Health Services must monitor older prisoners, and buried in the requirements is a provision worth knowing.

The policy defines three cohorts: “Accelerated Aging (age 50–64 years)”; “Elderly Inmate”, meaning someone “whose chronological age is 65 years or older”; and “Frail Elderly”, meaning offenders 65 or older who meet two or more of three criteria — permanent medical conditions producing end-organ damage that treatment “will not substantially arrest, reverse or control/mitigate”; needing daily human assistance with activities of daily living “despite the regular use of assistive devices”; or needing frequent assistance “to be reoriented to person, place, or time related to early stages of cognitive dysfunction.”

For both the frail elderly and elderly cohorts, the policy directs Health Services staff to “Evaluate annually for Reduction in Sentence (RIS) eligibility” — RIS being the Bureau’s term for compassionate release under 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A). That is an annual, mandatory, policy-required screen for everyone aged 65 or older in Bureau custody, and it is a separate route from the one this page is about.

The same policy also establishes practical entitlements that matter to families: aging-specific programming eligibility “upon their 50th birthday”, with needs reassessed “every six months”; a requirement that “[a] minimum of one program focused on aging issues will be provided per quarter”; accommodations requested through a BP-A0148, Inmate Request to Staff, decided individually and, in complex cases, by a “local Aging Offender Committee” led by the Associate Warden (Programs); and a reentry requirement that “[t]he Residential Reentry Management Branch must be notified in the referral packet of any releasing inmate with age related concerns (health care, mobility, dementia, etc.).”

That last one connects directly to the documents on our federal prison release plan page. An older person’s referral packet is supposed to carry the age-related concerns forward, and confirming that it does is a concrete thing to check before the packet leaves the institution.

How it differs from ordinary home confinement

These are two different statutes doing two different things, and conflating them causes real planning errors.

	Elderly / terminally ill pilot	Prerelease home confinement
Authority	34 U.S.C. § 60541(g)	18 U.S.C. § 3624(c)(2)
How long	“[U]ntil the expiration of the prison term”	180 days or 10% of the sentence, whichever is shorter — extendable by First Step Act credits under § 3624(g)
Who is eligible	Age 60+ and two-thirds served, or terminally ill / in need of nursing-facility care — plus the offense and risk conditions	Everyone approaching release, considered individually on the § 3621(b) factors
Does good conduct time count toward eligibility?	No	Not applicable — placement is measured from the projected release date
Halfway house first?	No — direct transfer is contemplated	Sometimes; often preceded by an RRC placement
Who decides	The Attorney General, through the Bureau	The Community Corrections Manager, on a unit team referral
Authorizing period	“[F]iscal years 2019 through 2023” on the face of the statute	Permanent

The ordinary route is on our federal home confinement page; the halfway-house alternative is on residential reentry center; and the statutory framework behind both, including this pilot’s origin in the Second Chance Act of 2007, is on second chance act.

Applying: the route and the documents

Who starts it. Either side. § 60541(g)(1)(B) allows placement “upon written request from either the Bureau of Prisons or an eligible elderly offender or eligible terminally ill offender.” In practice the request is made by the person, to the unit team, in writing.

When. Within six months of the two-thirds date — BOP’s FAQ says applications made earlier “will be returned.”

What to have ready, since a request without documentation is a request that goes into a queue:

• The two-thirds date, worked from the sentence computation sheet rather than from memory.
• The residence, verified, with the consent of the adults living there — the requirements are the same ones set out on our federal prison release plan page, and they are the part that takes longest.
• Medical documentation, for the terminally ill route: records supporting either a terminal diagnosis or a documented need for nursing-home or assisted-living care, together with the name of the Bureau-approved physician who will make the determination.
• Evidence of health-care coverage on release. Under BOP policy, a person on home confinement is responsible for their own medical and dental costs, and inability or refusal to bear them can mean return to an institution. For this population that is not a formality.
• Anything bearing on the cost finding in condition 6 — the statute requires the Bureau to find “a substantial net reduction of costs to the Federal Government,” and a person with significant medical needs in custody is, on the face of it, the strongest case for that finding rather than the weakest.

If it is denied. The route is the administrative remedy program at 28 C.F.R. Part 542, and after exhaustion a 2241 petition. Be clear-eyed about the ceiling: several of the conditions are expressly committed to Bureau discretion, and 18 U.S.C. § 3625 removes Administrative Procedure Act review from individual determinations under that subchapter. What is reviewable is a factual error — a miscomputed two-thirds date, an offense miscategorised as a crime of violence, a prior conviction misread — not a disagreement with the Bureau’s risk assessment. The pattern risk assessment that drives other routes is a separate instrument and does not decide this one, though it will not help to have a high one.

The honest bottom line

This is a small, discretionary program. Three of its seven conditions are Bureau determinations, one of them “in the sole discretion of the Bureau.” Its authorizing period, on the face of the statute, ran through fiscal year 2023, and we could not locate an extension — while the Bureau continues to publish it. That combination should shape expectations: it is worth asking about, worth documenting properly, and not worth building a plan around until the institution confirms in writing that it is accepting applications.

For people who do not fit it, the routes that remain are the ordinary ones — first step act time credits for those eligible to earn them, prerelease placement under the second chance act authority, the rdap eligibility reduction for those who qualify, and, where the medical picture is serious enough, compassionate release in the sentencing court. And for anyone already released, early termination of supervised release is the last item on the timeline.

Why work with Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C.

We work on elderly and medical placement matters in every federal district: computing the two-thirds date against the sentence computation sheet, assembling the medical documentation the statute requires, building the residence and health-care-coverage record, and pursuing administrative remedies where a denial rests on a factual error rather than a discretionary judgment.

Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C. is a boutique federal criminal defense and appellate firm founded in 2019, with offices in Columbia and Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, serving clients nationwide on an intentionally small caseload. Elizabeth Franklin-Best is admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court and twelve of the thirteen U.S. Courts of Appeals and has handled more than 330 federal proceedings, over 100 of them appeals. Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA, leads the firm’s federal prison consulting work and is the author of the Federal Prison Handbook and the Directory of Federal Prisons.

We will not tell you that a parent qualifies for this program before we have seen the computation and the medical record. The eligibility date is the first thing to get right, and it is the thing most often got wrong.

Schedule a consultation

If a family member is approaching 60, or is already past it and serving a long sentence, or has a diagnosis that would support the terminally ill route, the two-thirds date and the documentation are worth working out well in advance.

Schedule a consultation with Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C. Our practice is nationwide.

For the wider picture, start at our federal prison early release lawyer hub.

Frequently Asked Questions About Elderly Offender Home Detention

Reviewed for legal accuracy by Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., Principal Attorney·September 2026