The article says that federal prisoners' "good time" sentence reductions are automatically provided up front but you can lose good time and thus extend your sentence. That's smart thinking, to take advantage of loss aversion, a now-well-documented psychological phenomenon in behavioral economics [0].

(I do the same in my law-school classes: Students automatically get an up-front "signing bonus" for attendance in points on their final-grade total, but they can lose points by exceeding stated absence thresholds [1]. It works quite well for that purpose.)

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/loss-psychology.asp

[1] https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Syllabus.html#orgdc01c7d