VDOC is once again illegally prolonging people’s sentences by refusing to credit their hard work in Virginia prisons

RICHMOND, Va. – Today the ACLU of Virginia and Ali & Lockwood LLP filed a pair of lawsuits in federal court against the Virginia Department of Corrections (VDOC) for illegally prolonging the sentences of people in its custody by withholding sentence credits they worked hard to earn.

“This is not the first time VDOC has refused to honor the sentence credits that people have worked hard to earn,” said Ali & Lockwood’s Liz Lockwood. “This time, instead of picking and choosing which offenses VDOC deems eligible for the program, VDOC is deciding when people can begin earning credits. But someone’s credits don’t start when VDOC says so – according to the law, people’s credits start when their sentence does.”

Since 1995, the earned sentence credit program has made it possible for some people incarcerated in Virginia to earn their release. In 2020, Virginia’s General Assembly passed a law increasing how many credits people can earn. This expansion of the program was expected to impact thousands of people currently incarcerated in VDOC facilities – but for nearly two years, VDOC improperly withheld earned sentence credits from certain people who were eligible to earn them.

So the ACLU of Virginia sued, first in 2022, and again in 2023, to make sure VDOC followed the law, ultimately winning three different cases on behalf of individuals whose earned sentence credits VDOC initially refused to honor.

Two years later, VDOC is once again refusing to implement the earned sentence credit program according to the law. The statute requires that people begin to earn credits as soon as they are incarcerated and have a final conviction order. But VDOC has a policy that people cannot begin earning full credits until VDOC calculates their projected release date –a process that can take months. The delay means that VDOC is once again wasting taxpayer dollars in order to illegally prolong people’s incarceration.

“Just because VDOC doesn’t like the law as it’s written doesn’t mean it can go rogue and make its own,” said ACLU-VA Senior Supervising Attorney Vishal Agraharkar. “In Virginia, lawmakers make the law, not VDOC. How many times must we go to court before VDOC will simply follow the law and honor people’s hard work to earn sentence credits?”

In 2024, a federal suit resulted in VDOC paying $1.6 million in damages to more than 50 people from whom VDOC had withheld sentence credits they had earned. Today’s filings ask the court to award damages to those who have served longer sentences because of VDOC’s illegal policy, and to grant injunctive relief and a declaratory judgment under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to establish people’s right to earn sentence credits as soon as they become eligible. Welch and Weerapunyanont v. Dotson et al. and Whitmore v. Walters were filed in the Richmond division of the Eastern District of Virginia.