What Is Diesel Therapy? Federal Prisoner Transport

Where the Term Comes From

Diesel fuel. The buses run on it, and the name stuck. Prisonpedia's entry on diesel therapy defines it as the federal prisoner transport system, in which inmates are shackled and transported for extended periods, sometimes days or weeks, between correctional facilities, county jails and federal transfer centers. It lists bus therapy as another name for the same thing. You'll also see it written as deisel therapy, diesal therapy, disel therapy and diseal therapy, and Greyhound therapy turns up for the same idea in other settings.

The moving itself is done by JPATS, the Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System, which most people know as Con Air. It is a Justice Department revolving fund, and its own budget documents describe the job plainly: JPATS "coordinates the movement of federal prisoners and detainees in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) and the Bureau of Prisons (BOP), including pretrial, sentenced, and criminal aliens." Its FY 2018 performance budget puts numbers on the scale: 117,255 actual requests for air and ground transportation of prisoners in FY 2014, 111,540 in FY 2015 and 106,297 in FY 2016, with 115,000 planned for FY 2017 and 114,000 for FY 2018. It set the transportation unit cost target at $1,300, with FY 2016 coming in at $1,130. The budget defines that figure as the total average cost per prisoner from point of origin to final destination, including the cost of housing the prisoner while in transit. Layovers are a budget line.

Air legs run through Oklahoma City. FTC Oklahoma City is a Federal Transfer Center, one of the Bureau's administrative facilities, which the Bureau defines as institutions with special missions rather than sentence-serving institutions. Every administrative facility except the ADX can hold people in all security categories. Michael Rothenberg, describing his own transit for The Marshall Project, calls Oklahoma City "a hub for federal prisoner transit" with a holding facility right by the airport. The Bureau does not publish annual throughput for it, so treat any specific number you see as an estimate.

The Ten Transfer Types Policy Names

Almost every page on this topic says transfers happen "for various reasons" and moves on. The reasons are published. Chapter 7 of Program Statement 5100.08, Inmate Security Designation and Custody Classification opens with ten bullets, which the policy calls "some of the more frequent reasons for a transfer." So it isn't a closed list. It is the list the Bureau works from, and five of the ten carry numeric codes in the text. After the Unit Team reviews and approves it, the request goes to the Designation and Sentence Computation Center on Form 409. Here are the ten as the policy prints them.

Source: Bureau of Prisons Program Statement 5100.08, Inmate Security Designation and Custody Classification (September 12, 2006), Chapter 7, Inmate Transfer, as amended by Change Notice CN-1 (September 4, 2019) and republished with CN-3 (May 6, 2026).

Read that table for what isn't in it. Nine of the ten categories carry no standard for how long the trip may take, no cap on the number of layovers, and no requirement that the route be direct. The only place the policy commits to speed is medicine.

Why Nobody Tells You It's Happening

This is the part that breaks families, and the answer is in writing. Program Statement 5100.08 states that release to the general public of a person's designation or redesignation information "is prohibited, for security reasons, until the inmate has arrived at the designated facility." Then it goes further: a person confined in a Bureau facility "may be advised of the destination but will not be advised of the date or time of the transfer." Wardens may withhold the destination too.

So the sequence a family experiences, the calls stopping without warning and the inmate locator showing the old facility for days, is the policy working as written rather than a system that broke. Judges and members of Congress can be told in response to an official inquiry. A spouse cannot.

The practical consequence is that the conversation to have is the one before the move, not during it. Families who've agreed in advance on what silence means, and who've already handled money, mail and the phone list, do far better through a transfer than families improvising in the dark. That's covered in more depth in preparing your family for a surrender.

What the Trip Is Actually Like

The most detailed first-person account in the record is Michael Rothenberg's, published by The Marshall Project in August 2019. Read the sequence carefully, because it's the part people get wrong. He was already serving at FPC Montgomery, the camp on Maxwell Air Force Base less than two hours from his home in Birmingham. Another man walked away from the camp. Marshals questioned everyone who'd known him, Rothenberg told them he knew nothing, and a few days later he was summoned to the front and told he was going on a trip. Nobody told him where or why. What followed was 12 plane trips over 73 days: Alabama to a jail in Lovejoy, Georgia, then Oklahoma City, then Grady County Jail in Chickasha, then South Dakota, then Nevada, then Utah. He lost 37 pounds. The details he gives are a bus ride of more than three hours with no water and no air conditioning and an overflowing toilet underfoot, more than a hundred people shackled on a tarmac at the Atlanta airport, and 36 men in one small pod at Grady County with bunks stacked three high.

The reason that sequence matters is that the trip was not his trip to prison. He had already arrived. The move came out of an institution incident he had nothing to do with, which is the pattern families find hardest to believe: nothing changed in the case, nothing changed in the sentence, and the person is suddenly gone for two months.

Tom Sonoma's account for Freedom Grow covers seven months of the same thing, and adds the detail that explains the economics: county jails bill the federal government to hold federal prisoners, which gives a jail every reason to accept them and, in his telling, little reason to spend on them. He describes a jail in a small Oklahoma town where fifty men were put in a room the size of a squash court with two broken sinks and one toilet that barely worked, and bus seats he puts at roughly six inches of steel bench with about ten inches of knee room.

Sam Mangel went through it. He was remanded at sentencing, spent six weeks at the Philadelphia Detention Center, and then rode two weeks of buses and holding cells from Petersburg to Atlanta to Tallahassee before arriving at the camp in Miami. His wife had no idea where he was for most of it. That is the whole reason this page leads with the notification rule rather than with the bus: the silence is the part families are least prepared for, and it is the part written into policy. His full account is on the about page.

One correction to how this usually gets described, including on this page previously. Holdover is not the same as solitary confinement. Inside a Bureau institution, a holdover is placed in Administrative Detention, which is a restrictive housing unit. At a county jail it's usually the opposite problem: crowding, not isolation. Both are bad. They're bad in different ways, and telling a family to brace for solitary when the real risk is a crowded county pod isn't preparing them for anything.

The consistent losses across every account are the same: property arrives weeks late or not at all, phone access disappears, medication regimens break, and legal materials are gone at exactly the moment deadlines are running. Prisonpedia's entry on diesel therapy collects the transport mechanics, the holdover system and the notable cases in one place if you want the encyclopedia version.

Is Diesel Therapy Real, or Just What Transit Feels Like?

Both, and the honest answer is more useful than either half. There is no punitive transit code in Bureau policy. There are Codes 309 and 323 for disciplinary and close supervision transfers, and those require a written justification, a Warden's approval and, when requested, an investigation report. A disciplinary move is on paper. That's the design.

The allegations the term exists to describe are older than the current policy. The one that reached a federal appellate court belongs to Rudy Stanko, whose habeas litigation was decided by the Tenth Circuit as Stanko v. Davis, 617 F.3d 1262 (2010). Other names circulate online attached to this term, and we have left them out on purpose: the claims about them trace back to unsourced encyclopedia entries rather than to any court record we could verify, and naming a real person in connection with an allegation deserves a better foundation than that. What is in the record here is an allegation, not a finding the Bureau has ever accepted.

Most of the litigated horror stories are also not federal. A December 2025 note in the Texas Undergraduate Law Journal by Calista Kayatta walks through the leading cases, and the pattern is worth understanding before anyone quotes them at you. Stearns v. Inmate Services Corp., Wine v. Wisconsin Department of Corrections against TransCor, and the civil rights conviction of a Prisoner Transport Services officer all involve private for-profit transport contractors, not JPATS. Kayatta's lead example is a man moved by TransCor from Ohio to Colorado for a court appointment: a two-day trip that became twenty states in twenty days. Her explanation is the business model. These companies are paid per prisoner per mile, so the longest route pays best. JPATS is a revolving fund whose operating costs are reimbursed by the agencies it serves, and it doesn't carry that incentive. Conditions in federal transit are frequently miserable anyway. But the specific mechanism behind the worst reported cases isn't the one moving federal prisoners, and a page that blurs the two is teaching you to expect the wrong thing.

There's also a legal line that matters and gets blurred constantly. Under 18 U.S.C. 3621(b), "a designation of a place of imprisonment under this subsection is not reviewable by any court." Where the Bureau sends someone is essentially unappealable. How they were treated getting there is a different question with a different route, which is the remedy process below.

How Far From Home People Actually End Up

Section 601 of the First Step Act amended 18 U.S.C. 3621(b) to require the Bureau to place a person as close as practicable to their primary residence and, to the extent practicable, within 500 driving miles of it. The Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General audited compliance and published the results in Report 25-083 in September 2025.

On September 28, 2024, 36,098 people, or 33 percent of those evaluated, were more than 500 miles from their release residence. The Bureau had been measuring in straight-line distance rather than driving miles, which undercounted by roughly 8 percent and affected more than 8,600 people, and the same method fed the reports Congress received from 2020 through 2025. Auditors then pulled a sample of 100 placements. For 26 percent of them they could not determine why the person had been sent where they were sent, particularly where comparable facilities sat closer to home. The burden isn't evenly spread either: 51 percent of the Bureau's female population and 69 percent of Native American prisoners were more than 500 miles out. Recalculated in driving miles the way the statute requires, the OIG's own table puts 66 percent of people at Medical Care Level 4, the highest, more than 500 miles from home, against 40 percent at Level 1.

Distance and transit are the same problem seen twice. A designation 1,400 miles from home is a longer trip at the start, a harder trip for every subsequent move, and a nearer release transfer that has to be earned over 18 months of clear conduct before it can even be requested. Which is why the fight worth having is the first one, at facility designation, and why it starts before sentencing rather than after. Where the programming and release side of that gets worked out is early release eligibility.

What Actually Reduces Time in Transit

The advice usually given here, keep your head down and don't complain, is both unkind and wrong. Here's what the policy supports.

• Self-surrender, if the court allows it. This is the largest single lever anyone has, and it's decided in the courtroom rather than by the Bureau. Policy is also specific about a detail most people miss: the Designation and Sentence Computation Center records whether the person is to surrender to the U.S. Marshals or directly to the designated institution. Only the second one skips the transport system. Voluntary surrender is separately worth three points off the security point total, and it applies only to a post-sentencing surrender, not to someone who reports to the Marshals the same day as sentencing. How the self-surrender timeline works is worth reading before the sentencing hearing.
• Get the first designation right. Every later transfer is a consequence of the first placement. The inputs come out of the presentence report, which is why the presentence investigation is where the fight actually happens, months before anyone is designated anywhere.
• Understand which facility runs which program. A program transfer is a move. If RDAP matters, the question of which facilities run it belongs in the designation conversation, not eighteen months later. The same logic applies to earned time credits and release planning under the First Step Act.
• Clear conduct, for a specific reason. Not to stay invisible. Because Code 313 nearer release eligibility requires 18 consecutive months of clear conduct in general population, and Code 309 disciplinary transfers move people to greater security, usually further from home.
• Know what a camp designation changes. A minimum-security person with OUT or COMMUNITY custody may travel by unescorted transfer from a low or minimum security institution to a minimum security institution. The family piece is narrower: family on the approved visiting list may provide the transportation only on a minimum-to-minimum move, only with the Warden's approval, at the family's own cost, and the person must go directly from one institution to the other. That's in the policy, and almost nobody knows it. The full camp list and the scoring behind it covers who qualifies.

If the Trip Was Handled Badly, There's a Process

The Bureau's Administrative Remedy Program is set out in Program Statement 1330.18, implementing 28 C.F.R. Part 542. It has real deadlines in both directions, and the deadlines are short.

Source: BOP Program Statement 1330.18, Administrative Remedy Program, implementing 28 C.F.R. 542.14, 542.15 and 542.18.

Two details matter for anyone who's just come off a long transfer. First, the Bureau's own policy names "an extended period in-transit during which the inmate was separated from documents needed to prepare the Request or Appeal" as a valid reason for filing late. The Bureau wrote diesel therapy into its own excusable-delay list. Second, if raising the issue at the institution would put the person in danger, the request can be marked Sensitive and sent straight to the Regional Director with a written explanation of why it skipped the Warden.

Keep dates, facility names and staff names as they happen. A remedy filed six weeks later with a clear chronology is worth something. One filed from memory is not.

If You're Supporting a Woman

The distance problem is materially worse. The OIG found 51 percent of the Bureau's female population housed more than 500 miles from their release residence, against 33 percent overall, and the reason is structural: there are far fewer women's facilities, so the nearest eligible bed is routinely much further away. That means longer initial trips and fewer realistic nearer release options. Women's Federal Prison goes deeper on both, with a facility-by-facility directory and a longer treatment of how designation works for women and how to advocate for a facility near home.

Frequently Asked Questions