Task: songer_appnatpr

What follows is an opinion from a United States Court of Appeals.
Intervenors who participated as parties at the courts of appeals should be counted as either appellants or respondents when it can be determined whose position they supported. For example, if there were two plaintiffs who lost in district court, appealed, and were joined by four intervenors who also asked the court of appeals to reverse the district court, the number of appellants should be coded as six.
In some cases there is some confusion over who should be listed as the appellant and who as the respondent. This confusion is primarily the result of the presence of multiple docket numbers consolidated into a single appeal that is disposed of by a single opinion. Most frequently, this occurs when there are cross appeals and/or when one litigant sued (or was sued by) multiple litigants that were originally filed in district court as separate actions. The coding rule followed in such cases should be to go strictly by the designation provided in the title of the case. The first person listed in the title as the appellant should be coded as the appellant even if they subsequently appeared in a second docket number as the respondent and regardless of who was characterized as the appellant in the opinion.
To clarify the coding conventions, consider the following hypothetical case in which the US Justice Department sues a labor union to strike down a racially discriminatory seniority system and the corporation (siding with the position of its union) simultaneously sues the government to get an injunction to block enforcement of the relevant civil rights law. From a district court decision that consolidated the two suits and declared the seniority system illegal but refused to impose financial penalties on the union, the corporation appeals and the government and union file cross appeals from the decision in the suit brought by the government. Assume the case was listed in the Federal Reporter as follows:
United States of America,
Plaintiff, Appellant
v
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendant, Appellee.
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendants, Cross-appellants
v
United States of America.
Widgets, Inc. & Susan Kuersten Sheehan, President & Chairman
of the Board
Plaintiff, Appellants,
v
United States of America,
Defendant, Appellee.
This case should be coded as follows:Appellant = United States, Respondents = International Brotherhood of Widget Workers Widgets, Inc., Total number of appellants = 1, Number of appellants that fall into the category "the federal government, its agencies, and officials" = 1, Total number of respondents = 3, Number of respondents that fall into the category "private business and its executives" = 2, Number of respondents that fall into the category "groups and associations" = 1.
Note that if an individual is listed by name, but their appearance in the case is as a government official, then they should be counted as a government rather than as a private person. For example, in the case "Billy Jones & Alfredo Ruiz v Joe Smith" where Smith is a state prisoner who brought a civil rights suit against two of the wardens in the prison (Jones & Ruiz), the following values should be coded: number of appellants that fall into the category "natural persons" =0 and number that fall into the category "state governments, their agencies, and officials" =2. A similar logic should be applied to businesses and associations. Officers of a company or association whose role in the case is as a representative of their company or association should be coded as being a business or association rather than as a natural person. However, employees of a business or a government who are suing their employer should be coded as natural persons. Likewise, employees who are charged with criminal conduct for action that was contrary to the company policies should be considered natural persons.
If the title of a case listed a corporation by name and then listed the names of two individuals that the opinion indicated were top officers of the same corporation as the appellants, then the number of appellants should be coded as three and all three were coded as a business (with the identical detailed code). Similar logic should be applied when government officials or officers of an association were listed by name.
Your specific task is to determine the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "natural persons". If the total number cannot be determined (e.g., if the appellant is listed as "Smith, et. al." and the opinion does not specify who is included in the "et.al."), then answer 99.

POSNER, Circuit Judge.
Steven Lynn Ramsey, a federal prison inmate, claims that he should have received credit toward his prison sentence for the 96 days that he served in a halfway house before his criminal trial. Arrested by agents of the FBI for bank robbery and related crimes, Ramsey was released on bail on various conditions, including that he remain in St. Andrews Halfway House in Lexington, Kentucky until trial. He was later convicted and sentenced to 9 years in prison. He asked the warden of the prison in Wisconsin where he is confined to credit his time in the halfway house toward his prison sentence. The warden refused, and after exhausting his administrative remedies Ramsey brought this action under the habeas corpus statute, 28 U.S.C. §§ 2241 et seq.] cf. United States v. Hornick, 815 F.2d 1156, 1160 (7th Cir.1987).
Federal law provides that the “Attorney General shall give any [person sentenced to prison] credit toward service of his sentence for any days spent in custody in connection with the offense or acts for which sentence was imposed.” 18 U.S.C. § 3568. To a normal English speaker, even to a legal English speaker, being forced to live in a halfway house is to be held “in custody”; and the requirement of connection is satisfied here. Just the other day we affirmed in an unpublished order a judgment of conviction for escaping from a halfway house, under a statute which makes it a crime for anyone to escape or try to escape “from the custody of the Attorney General or his authorized representative, or from any institution or facility in which he is confined by direction of the Attorney General.” 18 U.S.C. § 751(a); United States v. Corcoran, 876 F.2d 106 (7th Cir.1989). Finally, in Johnson v. Smith, 696 F.2d 1334 (11th Cir.1983), on which Ramsey relies heavily, the Eleventh Circuit held that it is a violation of equal protection (the principle of equal protection of the laws was held in Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497, 74 S.Ct. 693, 98 L.Ed. 884 (1954), to be an implied term of the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause) to deny credit for time spent in a halfway house before trial, since confinement in a halfway house after sentencing does not toll the period of one’s sentence.
Despite all this, we agree with the government and the Fifth Circuit, see United States v. Smith, 869 F.2d 835 (5th Cir.1989), that “custody” in section 3568 does not include time spent in a halfway house awaiting trial. The word is a chameleon. In the habeas corpus statute itself “custody” includes being out on bail, see Hensley v. Municipal Court, 411 U.S. 345, 348-49, 93 S.Ct. 1571, 1573, 36 L.Ed.2d 294 (1973); see generally Maleng v. Cook, — U.S. -, 109 S.Ct. 1923, 1925-26, 104 L.Ed.2d 540 (1989), and Ramsey does not argue that the Attorney General is required to give jail credit for bail time. See United States v. Robles, 563 F.2d 1308 (9th Cir.1977) (per curiam); Sica v. United States, 454 F.2d 281 (9th Cir.1971) (per curiam). The wording of the escape statute actually supports the government’s argument here, since it distinguishes between “custody” on the one hand and confinement in any facility pursuant to an order of the Attorney General on the other. Ramsey was confined in the halfway house by direction of the Attorney General, but the escape statute implies that this may not have been custody.
In a halfway house (“residential community center” in bureaucratese) the inmate or resident is confined only at night, placing him in a twilight zone between prison and freedom. Whether such confinement should count as time served toward his prison sentence — whether the deprivation of liberty by confinement in a halfway house is sufficiently like prison to be treated the same in deciding how long the convicted criminal should serve — is not a question susceptible of rational determination, at least by tools of inquiry available to judges. It is a matter of judgment, or policy, or discretion, and we are fortunate in having a policy statement by the Bureau of Prisons which opines unequivocally that “Time spent in residence in a residential community center ... as a condition of bail or bond ... is not creditable as jail time since the degree of restraint provided by residence in a community center is not sufficient restraint to constitute custody within the meaning or intent of 18 U.S.C. 3568.” BOP Policy Statement No. 5880.24(5)(b)(5). This is a reasonable opinion by officials having greater knowledge of federal penal policy than we judges have, so we are inclined to defer to it.
We are unpersuaded by the Eleventh Circuit’s equal-protection analysis. Criminals sentenced to serve a part of their term in a halfway house rather than in a prison are not given credit for time served in the same sense in which Ramsey is seeking credit. They are merely beneficiaries of the Attorney General’s discretionary authority to “designate as a place of confinement any available, suitable, and appropriate institution or facility,” 18 U.S.C. § 4082(b) (since repealed), expressly including a halfway house, see § 4082(g). The legislative history of section 4082(g) indicates that Congress wanted to facilitate the re-entry of convicts into society by making the last stage of their confinement transitional— hence the apt name “halfway house.” See S.Rep. No. 613, 89th Cong., 1st Sess. 2 (1965), U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News 1965, p. 3076; Brown v. Rison, 673 F.Supp. 1505, 1510 (C.D.Cal.1987). That policy has no application to a prisoner moving in the opposite direction, like Ramsey.
We affirm the dismissal of Ramsey’s action for habeas corpus. Since our decision creates a conflict with the Eleventh Circuit we have circulated the opinion in advance of publication to all the active circuit judges, none of whom has voted to hear the case en banc. See 7th Cir.R. 40(f).
Affirmed.

Question: What is the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "natural persons"? Answer with a number.
Answer:

Answer: 1