18-c-3 Good-time Credits

• Library: A Jailhouse Lawyer's Manual (2020 Edition)

18-C-3. Good-Time Credits

Having good-time credits does not neessarily mean that you have a protected liberty interest.⁶¹ To claim a liberty interest, your state must have created an interest. ⁶² For example, in Reynolds v. Wolff, a Nevada law allowed prisoners to accumulate good-time credits "unless the prisoner ha[d] committed serious misbehavior." ⁶³ The court found that this law offered a "right of 'real substance'" by providing good-time credits. According to the court in Reynolds, this created a liberty interest under the due process analysis.⁶⁴ Finding prisoners guilty of "serious misbehavior" would make the prisoners lose good-time credits. Therefore, before Nevada prisons find prisoners guilty, they must tell prisoners the charges against them and give them a chance to be heard. ⁶⁵

The chance to earn good-time credits, however, is not a protected liberty interest by itself.⁶⁶ For example, in Luken v. Scott, ⁶⁷ the prisoner was put in administrative segregation and could not, therefore, receive any more good-time credits that would have helped him get parole. Still, the court found no liberty interest because the "loss of opportunity to earn good-time credits ... is an [unsure] consequence of administrative decisions [that] do not create constitutionally protected liberty interests." ⁶⁸ Similarly, in Bulger v. U.S. Bureau of Prisons, losing a prison job did not automatically involve a liberty interest even though the...