BOSTON — A federal magistrate recommended Monday that disgraced lawyer John M. Cicilline’s bid to win early prison release be dismissed.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert B. Collings issued a report and recommendations calling for the dismissal of Cicilline’s request that he be freed immediately to a halfway house. It will now be up to U.S. District Judge Joseph L. Tauro to make a final decision.

His father and former law partner, John F. “Jack” Cicilline, told Collings Thursday that the U.S. Bureau of Prisons violated his son’s due-process rights by failing to consider his personal struggles in deciding when he would be released to a halfway house.

“What we’re talking about is current conditions. It’s about saving his residence, saving his kids,” the elder Cicilline said in U.S. District Court in Boston.

But Collings accepted the government’s arguments that the bureau had considered Cicilline’s case individually, based on the factors set forth by federal law, and therefore maintained “virtually unlimited discretion” to place Cicilline as it saw fit.

John M. Cicilline and Joseph A. Bevilacqua Jr., a former state Supreme Court chief justice’s son and also a disbarred lawyer, pleaded guilty in June 2008 to engaging in an illegal shakedown scheme to gain money from people accused of drug crimes.

That October, Cicilline, the brother of Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline, began serving an 18-month sentence at Fort Devens for conspiracy, obstruction of justice and making false statements to federal authorities.

Cicilline, 52, is due to be put on supervised release in Rhode Island on Feb. 8, 2010, after he serves 41 days in a halfway house in Massachusetts. He is being held at a federal medical center in Fort Devens, Mass., north of Worcester.

Cicilline, who appeared to have shed about 50 pounds at Thursday’s court appearance, has 10 days to file a written objection to the report.

kmulvane@projo.com