RDAP — the Residential Drug and Alcohol Program — is the Bureau of Prisons course that takes a year off a federal sentence on completion, and the centrepiece of the practical advice John Kiriakou gives people who are about to be imprisoned.
His explanation of the arithmetic is straightforward: a federal prisoner earns good-conduct credit, and on top of that “you get another year off for RDAP” — and, he adds, you are in a low-security prison while doing it.[1][2]
The same arithmetic underlies the counsel he gave Daniel Hale when Hale was facing sentencing and the figure of five years came up. Kiriakou told him five years was “a steal”, and that there is a trick to doing the time.[3] He applies the same reckoning generally: three and a half years feels like thirty, but once past the first year, with halfway house time, house arrest and good-behaviour credit, three and a half years is really about two.[4]
Kiriakou’s own sentence produced none of these reductions. Because he was writing the Letters from Loretto about conditions inside, he received no halfway-house time at all and served every single day.[5]
What the counselling consisted of, and the all-or-nothing rule
Kiriakou describes the programme as ten or twelve months of drug and alcohol counselling worth up to eighteen months off a sentence — with the qualification that decides cases: “you have to complete the whole year before you get the reward.”[6][7]
What the counselling actually was, in his own institution, he reports without comment: “at least in the prison that I was in, you go every week and you watch videotaped episodes of Intervention from A&E — and that counts as your drug and alcohol counselling.”[7]
The all-or-nothing rule is what makes removal from the programme a punishment in itself. Jeremy Hammond had two months left when he was pulled out and sent to the federal holding centre in Alexandria to face a grand jury — which, on Kiriakou’s arithmetic, “effectively added 18 months to his sentence.”[8][9]