Not picking on this comment in particular and not a domain expert, but just a few ideas:
- System needs to track sexual offenders and provide updates on their locations to relevant municipalities
- Parole officer check, requirements, and termination system needs to know who, what, and where
- Statistical record-keeping systems for sentence lengths need to be updated
- If felons, voting systems need to be kept updated
All of these sorts of actions would be triggered by someone’s release and probably involve interconnected systems that rely on truth data about the initial release.
One major thing my career in software and systems has taught me is that things are rarely as simple as they seem on the surface. I tend to approach such systems with humility.
Pay each inmate $10k for each day they're unable to leave prison past one week after the end of their sentence. Most inmates probably wouldn't mind staying a couple months longer if it means they get to leave with a million dollars in the bank, and it would correct the state's incentives.
You the taxpayers are the people who would prefer these people stay in prison than release them. You took on the responsibility when you put in place a system to imprison them. You could always campaign for prison abolition if you don’t want the responsibility...
> You the taxpayers are the people who would prefer these people stay in prison than release them.
That's a rather broad blanket statement bordering on collective punishment (which BTW is classified as a war crime by the UN). The status of taxpayer makes you a victim of the state, not necessarily someone with influence over its behavior and certainly not an ardent supporter of all its policies. The vast majority of the taxpayers had nothing to do with the situation and might well be opposed to keeping these people in prison if the facts were explained to them.
Perhaps the matter should be put to a general vote—those actually in favor of keeping the inmates in prison can split the cost of any wrongful-imprisonment suit in the event the state loses.
Luckily I’m not at war with anyone. The vast majority of the population do approve of the prison system though, and shrugging off responsibility for what that means seems perverse.
And yet, the software may save more than a million dollars in admin costs. And as soon as the most of the bug are worked out, it can operate less of those payouts. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
I don't understand how people here fail to see that completely. Traffic accidents also happen, doesn't mean we should abolish vehicles or allow only slow moving armored vehicles on the road.
Without the software, how will they know it's time to release?
Also, if you release someone and the system still shows them as being in there, that could lead to a very bad interaction for that person if they have any official interaction with authorities while they are out.
You assume that not only was there a bug in the software (in that it had not been updated to follow the law) but also it was terribly designed in that it could not cope with manual overrides.
None of those problems cited are the problems of the inmate/ex-con. It's the state that is choosing to go ahead with implementing buggy software affecting people's freedom, it's the state's duty to make things right.
I have done some reading about people who got convicted wrongfully. Being released from US prison is an extremely bureaucratic and slow process where nobody seems to be willing to apply some judgement. As long as the process was followed everything is fine even if it’s blindingly obvious that the person is innocent.
Getting into prison is easy but getting out is really hard and will take you years even if everybody agrees a mistake was made.
They might only know that it is not calculating some sentences correctly. That does mean they have figured out little more beyond "we know it is wrong."
This is a somewhat horrific argument for draconian imprisonment.
Maybe we'd have better results if inmates could file paperwork to receive the payments that would normally go to the prison for their imprisonment, starting on the date they should have been released.
The imprisonment data is coordinated between the prison, the police, the prosecution, the public service system and local governments. All of them needs to be up-to-date, or somebody would be screwed in process.
If the list is public, we can at least do the math independently to hold corrections departments accountable (filing suit to release eligible inmates when corrections won’t voluntarily release because of “software enhancements waiting to be built”).
Not that simple. There are behavioral factors that can affect a prisoner's status and that particular information would never be public.
It's a full-on bureaucracy where only the computers actually know the correct full calculation for every prisoner due to the complexity of the formulas, and when the computers can't do that correctly people get screwed with no recourse because it's humanly impossible to keep up with every detail.
I agree it's not simple. I am advocating for activist (engineering, political, etc) efforts against The Bureaucracy. Public data is a component of that, from a transparency and accountability perspective, very similar to FOIAing everything you can get your hands on (ie muckrock.com). You want to be able to "show your work" in broad daylight.
No, I want the presumably thousands of people who work at prisons to each go through their list of prisoners and determine when prisoners should be released, using the assistance of software but not completely deferring to software.
People working at prisons have no incentive to be kind or instill any kind of humanity in their actions, thus I would expect having them go through their list of prisoners and determine when prisoners should be released to have just as cynical a result as relying on broken software.
I don't understand why that's your default presumption. Although I don't have any data about this, my impression is that generally people are aware of how long their prison sentences are and are released from prison when they are supposed to be.
