Opinion ID: 148382
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Inmate Financial Responsibility Program

Text: Boyd's second argument on appeal is that the district court erred when it ordered him to pay his fine and special assessments through the IFRP, under which staff members from the Bureau of Prisons assist inmates in developing plans to meet their financial obligations. See 28 C.F.R. § 545.10. Inmates who do not participate may lose a number of privileges identified in 28 C.F.R. § 545.11(d), which include participating in the UNICOR prison job training program, furloughs, and outside work details, and having higher commissary spending limits, access to higher-status housing, and access to community-based programs. Boyd objects that the IFRP is a voluntary program, so that the sentencing court could not command his participation. He urges us to remand his case so that the district court can delete the requirement from the judgment. Boyd did not raise this issue before the district court, so we review only for plain error. The IFRP can be an important part of a prisoner's efforts toward rehabilitation, but strictly speaking, participation in the program is voluntary. We have described participation as voluntary in several nonprecedential decisions. See United States v. Vasquez, 333 Fed.Appx. 125, 126 (7th Cir.2009); United States v. Mayo, No. 08-3261, slip op. at 3 (7th Cir. July 20, 2009); United States v. Love, 329 Fed. Appx. 667, 668 (7th Cir.2009). As those decisions recognize, an inmate in the Bureau of Prisons' custody may lose certain privileges by not participating in the IFRP, but the inmate's participation cannot be compelled. See also United States v. Lemoine, 546 F.3d 1042, 1047 (9th Cir.2008) (An inmate is free to decline to participate in the IFRP, but the failure either to participate or to comply with a financial plan created pursuant to the program carries certain consequences.). It is not clear to us why Boyd does not want to participate in the program and prefers to forgo the relevant privileges and to pay the modest sums he owes after he finishes his lengthy prison sentence, but that is his position here. [1] The government acknowledges that the IFRP is voluntary and that it would be error to order participation, but the government argues that the district court never actually ordered Boyd to participate in the program. According to the government, the district court must have contemplated that Boyd could opt not to participate in the IFRP because the court also said that if he did not pay his fine and special assessment in full before his release from prison, he would have to pay at least 10 percent of his earnings toward them while on supervised release. Both the court's oral statements and its written judgment, the government says, support the view that the court left participation in the IFRP up to Boyd. We disagree. The district court's wordsan explicit oral directive that payments shall be made through the IFRP, consistent with a written instruction that the monetary sanctions are to be paid through the IFRPplainly ordered Boyd to participate in the IFRP. The government's reading is strained at best. If the government really believes that the court intended for Boyd to participate in the program only if he chooses to do so, then the government should have no objection to Boyd's request that the judgment be corrected to remove doubt about the nature of his participation. Instead, the government opposes relief. Was this a plain error? The government says that correcting the judgment is unnecessary because any error in ordering Boyd to participate in the IFRP did not seriously affect the fairness, integrity, or public reputation of the proceedings in the district court. See United States v. Lewis, 597 F.3d 1345, 1347 (7th Cir.2010). Boyd takes the opposite view and points to Mayo, in which the defendant did not object to the district court's IFRP order. We concluded that an appellate challenge to compelled participation in the program would not be frivolous and denied his lawyer's motion to withdraw under Anders v. California, 386 U.S. 738, 87 S.Ct. 1396, 18 L.Ed.2d 493 (1967). The parties in Mayo accepted our invitation to file a joint motion for remand. We granted the motion, vacated the sentence, and directed the district court to impose a sentence without ordering participation in the IFRP. United States v. Mayo, No. 08-3261 (7th Cir. Sept.2, 2009) (nonprecedential decision). As the government concedes, the Bureau of Prisons lacks the power to compel participation in the IFRP. Administrators may establish a payment schedule, but a prisoner may choose instead to bear the consequences of not participating. See 28 C.F.R. § 545.11(d); Lemoine, 546 F.3d at 1046-47. After conceding that the IFRP is voluntary, the government fails to explain how the district court's order to participate can be correct. In the government's view, the court did nothing more than order Boyd to pay what he owes, see United States v. Sawyer, 521 F.3d 792, 797 (7th Cir.2008), and correcting the error now would promote expensive, technical, but essentially meaningless do-overs, United States v. Tejeda, 476 F.3d 471, 475 (7th Cir.2007). But Sawyer and Tejeda addressed situations in which district courts did not do at sentencing what they were required to do by statute. The district court in Tejeda erred when it delegated to the probation office its own obligation to determine the frequency of drug testing for a defendant on supervised release. Tejeda, 476 F.3d at 473-74. And the district courts in Sawyer erred when they failed to set post-imprisonment restitution payment schedules for defendants who could not pay immediately. Sawyer, 521 F.3d at 796. In this case, however, the district court's error was not one of delegation or omission. The court overstepped its bounds when it ordered him to participate in the IFRP. We conclude that this error was plain. That term of the judgment cannot be enforced as written, and the Bureau of Prisons cannot look to it as authority for compelling Boyd to participate in the IFRP. Boyd's participation, like that of all imprisoned defendants, must remain voluntary, though subject to the loss of privileges identified in 28 C.F.R. § 545.11(d). We have considered the possibility that the sentence should be vacated in its entirety, so that the district court could consider all portions of the sentence, including the custody term, as part of a full resentencing. If the sums in question were substantially greater, or if there were indications in the record that the district judge linked expected participation in the IFRP to other aspects of the sentence, we would be inclined to do so, leaving the district court to fashion an entirely new sentence with the recognition that participation in the IFRP may not be required. In this case, however, because these sums are so modest, because there is no indication of such linkage in the record, and because the government has not argued for a full resentencing as an appropriate remedy, we see no reason to take that step. Instead, we conclude that in this case, a simple modification in the district court's sentence will suffice to correct the error. With the modification of clarifying that Boyd's participation in the Inmate Financial Responsibility Program is voluntary, the district court's judgment is AFFIRMED AS MODIFIED.