The Federal Bureau of Prisons lists Wednesday as the “release date” for convicted former Scranton Mayor Bill Courtright, who has spent more than a year out of federal prison but under the supervision of an office that oversees halfway houses and home confinement.
Courtright pleaded guilty July 2, 2019, to criminal conspiracy, bribery and extortion for pay-to-play shakedowns of companies and vendors that did business with the city.
He was sentenced Oct. 2, 2020, to seven years and incarcerated shortly thereafter at a federal prison in Morgantown, West Virginia. It’s unclear when the former mayor was released from prison, but as of August 2024 online public data on inmates maintained by the Bureau of Prisons listed Courtright as being under the supervision of RRM Philadelphia, a residential reentry management field office within the bureau.
The Bureau of Prisons contracts with residential reentry centers, also known as halfway houses, to provide assistance to inmates who are nearing release, with some under home confinement. While the bureau’s inmate-search tool only lists the RRM field office responsible for an inmate, not specific reentry centers, federal court documents Courtright filed in March said he was “serving the remainder of his sentence on home confinement under the supervision of the Residential Reentry Center in Scranton.”
As of Tuesday, the bureau’s online inmate locator listed Courtright’s location as “Philadelphia RRM” and his release date as “10/15/2025.” More than 13,300 federal offenders are managed by RRM field offices nationwide, including 4,733 on home confinement, bureau statistics show.
Efforts to obtain information from the field office were not immediately successful, nor were efforts to reach Courtright by phone. The Federal Bureau of Prison’s Office of Public Affairs was not available to respond to inquiries amid the federal government shutdown.
Courtright’s listed Wednesday release date suggests a total of roughly five years served of the original seven-year sentence.
At the start of that sentence in October 2020, his release date was listed as Oct. 15, 2026. That date included a year’s reduction in time served for good behavior that was credited in advance, bureau officials said in 2020.
Courtright, a Democrat, was first elected Scranton mayor in 2013 and reelected four years later. He resigned in 2019, amid the corruption scandal.
Originally Published: October 14, 2025 at 4:48 PM EDT