Compassionate release statistics: how often the BOP said yes

What the law says now (October 2026). A federal judge can reduce a sentence for “extraordinary and compelling” reasons (reasons that are especially unusual and convincing). You must first ask the warden in writing. You can file in court 30 days after the warden gets the request, or sooner if you finish the Bureau of Prisons’ appeals (18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A)). The judge also weighs the sentencing factors in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a). See who may seek compassionate release.

Family circumstances. A court may consider the death or incapacitation of the caregiver of your minor child (or of an adult child who cannot care for themselves), or the incapacitation of a spouse, registered partner, or parent when you would be the only available caregiver (U.S.S.G. § 1B1.13(b)(3)).
Age. A court may consider a person who is 65 or older, has a serious decline in health because of aging, and has served at least 10 years or 75 percent of the sentence, whichever is less (U.S.S.G. § 1B1.13(b)(2)). A separate rule covers people 70 or older who have served 30 years under 18 U.S.C. § 3559(c) (§ 3582(c)(1)(A)(ii)).

For decades, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) approved very few compassionate release requests. Reports covering 2006 to 2018 show that most requests never reached the BOP Director, and many people died while waiting for an answer.

How often is compassionate release granted?

Not often. Since the First Step Act of 2018, most motions are filed in court by people in prison, and judges deny most of them. In the first half of fiscal year 2025 (October 1, 2024, through March 31, 2025), judges granted 15.2 percent of the compassionate release motions they decided, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. See How often judges grant compassionate release (2025). Those numbers come from before May 28, 2026, when the Supreme Court held in Rutherford v. United States that a sentencing change Congress did not make retroactive cannot be a reason for release.

The rest of this page covers what the numbers showed before and after 2018.

Before 2018: only the Bureau could ask

In 1984, Congress passed a law letting federal courts reduce a federal prisoner’s sentence when “extraordinary and compelling” circumstances justify early release. The law told the U.S. Sentencing Commission to write policy describing those circumstances.

Unfortunately, the law also limited who could bring a motion for compassionate release. Until the First Step Act of 2018, only one person could: the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Now the prisoner can file too, after asking the warden and waiting 30 days or finishing the Bureau’s appeals.

This article walks through the compassionate release statistics so you can understand how the federal program has really worked.

The Bureau of Prisons exists to keep prisoners confined, so it is not surprising that it has been extremely stingy about filing these motions. It has also seemed unmoved by bad press, and even by harsh words from Senators and the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG).

The 2013 Office of Inspector General report

In 2013, the OIG issued a report on how the BOP handled compassionate release requests from 2006 through 2011. The OIG was blunt: “The BOP does not properly manage the compassionate release program, resulting in inmates who may be candidates for release not being considered.” The numbers tell the story:

The OIG reviewed only the 208 requests that wardens referred to the Director, because the Bureau had no way of knowing how many applications wardens received in total.
206 of the 208 requests referred to the Director were for medical reasons, either a terminal or debilitating illness.
The Director approved 142 (68 percent) and denied 38 (18 percent).
Of the 38 that were denied, 22 (58 percent) were denied because of the seriousness of the prisoner’s offense or criminal history.
28 (13 percent) of the 206 medical applicants died while waiting for a response from the Director.

What the BOP told 12 Senators in 2017

On August 3, 2017, twelve U.S. Senators wrote to then-BOP Director Thomas Kane with concerns about how the Bureau ran the compassionate release program. They asked for data. In response, the BOP supplied these numbers for 2014 to 2018:

Wardens received 817 applications based on a terminal medical condition; 405 were referred to the Director (<50 percent).
Wardens received 1,106 applications based on a debilitating medical condition; 181 were referred to the Director (<20 percent).
Wardens received 477 applications for elderly-medical compassionate release; 117 were referred to the Director (<25 percent).
Wardens received 268 applications for elderly-non-medical compassionate release; 87 were referred to the Director (<40 percent).
Wardens received 282 applications for child caregiver compassionate release; 33 were referred to the Director (<15 percent).
Wardens received 109 applications for incapacitated spouse compassionate release; 15 were referred to the Director (<15 percent).
Although the numbers do not add up, the BOP told the Senators that from 2014 to 2018, the Director approved 306 requests for compassionate release consideration and denied 2,405.
81 prisoners died between 2014 and 2018 while waiting for a compassionate release decision from the Director.

These numbers show how rarely the Bureau of Prisons granted relief.

The 2018 New York Times report

The Marshall Project and The New York Times obtained federal data covering 2013 to 2017 and reported on it in the Times on March 7, 2018. According to that data:

Wardens received 5,400 compassionate release applications.
The Director approved about 300 applications, or 6 percent.
The Director approved 50 applications (2 percent) for non-medical release.
The Bureau did not explain why the data given to the Times did not match the data given to the twelve Senators.

Why the Bureau’s numbers don’t match

The Bureau’s data is hard to reconcile. The figures it gave the Senators add up to 3,059 requests from 2014 to 2018, while the data reported by The New York Times showed about 5,400 requests from 2013 to 2017. The two sets also differ on deaths: 81 people died waiting from 2014 to 2018 in the figures given to the Senators, and 266 died waiting from 2013 to 2017 in the data reported by the Times. The Inspector General’s 2013 report had already found that the Bureau could not say how many requests wardens received.

Court data from 2020

Once people could file their own motions, courts received thousands of them during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Sentencing Commission’s report on motions decided through December 31, 2020, counted 12,138 motions: judges granted 2,549 (21.0 percent) and denied 9,589 (79.0 percent). Results varied widely by district. The District of Oregon granted 68.5 percent of 92 motions, while the Western District of North Carolina granted 5 of 241 (2.1 percent). Of the filers the Commission recorded for granted motions, 96.4 percent were the person in prison and 0.7 percent were the Bureau of Prisons (U.S. Sentencing Commission, Compassionate Release Data Report, Calendar Year 2020, June 2021 (PDF)).

These are statistics about other people’s cases. They do not predict the result in any one case.

What these numbers mean

Every piece of data made public points the same way: the BOP has not been doing its job on compassionate release. The Bureau seems to believe it has the right to decide whether a prisoner’s situation deserves a sentence reduction.

As the Senators pointed out, that is not the case. “ It is the appropriate purview of the sentencing court to determine if a defendant’s circumstances warrant a sentencing reduction under compassionate release,” the Senators wrote.

Under federal law, the Bureau’s role is administrative. If the criteria established by the U.S. Sentencing Commission are met, the Bureau’s simple task is to file the motion in federal court. Even so, the Bureau has seemed more interested in keeping people locked up than in letting sentencing courts consider most compassionate release cases.

If you want help with a compassionate release request, book a consultation.

How often the Bureau of Prisons approved release