This Human Rights Watch report presents the stories of individual prisoners, most of whom were denied compassionate release by the Bureau of Prisons. These stories are of prisoners who, in our opinion, have the requisite “extraordinary and compelling” reasons to seek compassionate release as described by the United States Sentencing Commission. Though it does not know, of course, whether the courts would have granted early release to any of these prisoners, HRW believes the BOP should have forwarded their cases on to the courts so that judges could have made that decision.