"Inslee said the state is working to locate offenders released early who need to complete their sentences. Five have been returned to prison, according to Brown."
What can this possibly accomplish? Presumably these people were released, probably had no idea they were released early, and now have potentially settled into their life again. Returning them to prison can only do more harm than letting it go, and seems more spite than justice.
The governor ordered the DOC to halt all releases of prisoners whose sentences could have been affected until a hand calculation is done to ensure offenders are being released on the correct date.
Since the bug affects 3% of the prisoners, this means they are willingly illegally detaining 97% of the people that are to be released next month. And just to add insult to the damage they say they do it to "ensure offenders are being released on the correct date". Later is not correct.
If the offense did not include firearms, deadly weapon, of sex offense enhancements, the inmate does not meet the "could have been affected" criteria. The same is true if there was no "good time" applied to the sentence at all.
If they cannot prove that an inmate's scheduled release date is incorrect, they would be released. The DOC does not have the power to hold an inmate beyond their release date.
> If they cannot prove that an inmate's scheduled release date is incorrect, they would be released.
I would hope so, but I think that at the very least the language was chosen to suggest that they would err on the side of keeping people incarcerated. That this could be seen as politically rewarding is... scary.
This bug almost looks like a feature to me. The actual bug is the criminal justice politics that has resulted in an incarceration rate of 256 in such a wealthy and homogeneous society as Washington state.
The incarceration rate in Washington state, while actually being the tenth lowest in the US, is 2-4 times higher than that of European states of comparable size, wealth and diversity, such as Sweden, Belgium or Austria.
The murder rate per capita in Washington state is 2.4x higher than Sweden. High crime rates in the U.S. predate the modern high incarceration rate, the drug war, or even alcohol prohibition: http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/homicid...
Sure, but a homicide rate of 2.5 per 100,000 only explains a fraction of the incarceration rate of 256 per 100,000 (although much more than the 1 percent since homicide is in average punished with longer sentences).
The rest is due to incarceration for other crimes.
The problem is that 1) so much is considered a crime 2) more of the crimes are prosecuted, and 3) crimes are punished with longer sentences.
> I would think things like strict gun control in other countries could lead to a different ratio of murder to other violent crimes.
You'd probably be wrong. Must gun related fatalities are either self-inflicted or accidental. Murder usually occurs in a fit of rage between people who know each other, i.e. found a cheating spouse, road rage, drunk and stress, etc. You don't need a gun to kill someone, and I would wager most murder occurs through some sort of beating/strangulation.
Further, the United States is 121 on the list of intentional homicides on wikipedia[1], where as Greenland (Denmark), which arguably has tougher laws is 26 on the list. However, if you compare the list to those of the poorest nations, you'll find a much stronger correlation. violent crime is far more correlated to the wealth per person in an area than gun regulation.
Gun control is more-or-less just a politically charged topic that is used to garner votes from the public based on emotional pleas.
> where as Greenland (Denmark), which arguably has tougher laws is 26 on the list.
...which resulted from 11 - eleven! - homicides. It's an anomalous stat because Greenland is so sparsely populated. I can't help but feel you're making an incredibly dishonest argument.
The Denmark mainland is on the list too, which is worth mentioning. It's ranked #202, with 47 homicides. Sure, the population is that of a smallish US state - it'd be somewhere around the 20th most-populous state - but the US had twelve thousand murders in the year listed. The rate is more than four times higher. Not a single US state, as of 2010, had a lower murder rate than Denmark's 0.8/100k.
2014 wasn't a fluke. Two thirds of murders in the US are committed with guns.
> Gun control is more-or-less just a politically charged topic that is used to garner votes from the public based on emotional pleas.
At least we can agree on this. For some reason people react emotionally to violent crime, go figure. What's unfortunate is that it doesn't (and realistically never will) garner nearly enough votes to enact policies that could put a dent in the murders.
"Many prisoners released early may not wind up being re-incarcerated, according to Brown. The law requires the state to give day-for-day credit in most cases to a prisoner who has been released early and hasn’t been found to break any laws since, he said."
It's unclear whether "breaking the law" includes speeding.
It's also unclear whether (former) prisoners must avoid breaking the law until their proper release date, or whether they must avoid breaking the law until the state discovers its mistake.
If it's the latter, it would be in the interest of an incorrectly released prisoner to inform the state of its mistake the morning after their proper release date. Of course, in this particular situation, the prisoners likely had no idea they were incorrectly released.
If you were released the average of 55 days early, my guess is that you are not re-incarcerated unless you commit another crime sufficient that you would be returned to prison. At that time the first 55 days of your sentence would be for the first crime, not the new one.
Especially considering the average computational error was 55 days. Seems to me that this whole thing is just another bureaucrats revenge. Get those TPS reports...
>Especially considering the average computational error was 55 days.
Add to that, that the problem existed for 13 years. I would say that it's a non-issue, barely worth fixing. The persons that have been release earlier are prisoners that have shown good behavior, so I doubt that it will any more dangerous, despite the circumstances for their crime.
The law seems a little buggy to me though. Why does it even make sense that you can earn "good time", but only towards a portion of your sentence and not the whole thing? If you don't want people to get out to early just specify a minimum time that must be served.
>Returning them to prison can only do more harm than letting it go, and seems more spite than justice.
Well, from "three strikes law" and solitary confinement allowed to run for years, to the death penalty, "more spite than justice" covers the US legal/prison system perfectly.
In Texas, for example, charges can be enhanced, up one level (Class A/B/C misdemeanors and felonies) for a single prior conviction.
The enhanced charge then later, becomes leverage to further enhance future charges.
It has resulted in some odd sentences, including 16 years for shoplifting a candy bar. This was someone with lots of prior charges, but all of them for relatively minor shoplifting offenses. The felonies mentioned in his history were "enhanced" charges.
>It has resulted in some odd sentences, including 16 years for shoplifting a candy bar. This was someone with lots of prior charges, but all of them for relatively minor shoplifting offenses.
In Europe there's a strong tradition of tolerance towards those kinds of things, and I think at least part of it (because they did use to happen in the 19th century and prior) is because of the figure of Jean Valjean being a prominent counter-example.
Btw, isn't it also the case in the US that those who attempt to escape are getting an expanded sentence? One very humane thing I've read, is that in some countries such as Germany attempting to escape is considered part of the basic human nature towards freedom, and is not punishable (except if you commit another crime during your escape, but the escape itself does not add years to your term).
Reminds me of a great newspaper investigation in Nebraska a few years back. A journalist heard a story of an inmate who got released significantly early and so he and a data reporter scraped the prisons web site and, by doing simple math based on the scraped fields, found that hundreds of inmates had been wrongly scheduled...it wasn't quite just a software error, but a too simplified formula that someone stuck in the system and apparently no one bothered to double check things http://www.omaha.com/news/metro/world-herald-special-investi...
Your comment reminded me of a funny thing. I did a couple years in the Alaskan prison system. The prison I was in served two tacos every Wednesday for lunch.
I worked in the computer lab, and as a lark, I wrote a cute program where an inmate could input their projected release date, and the program would tell them how many tacos they had left before their release.
Years later, after my release, I learned that the department of corrections had been sued by an inmate who alleged their "Taco Time Calculator" had miscalculated his sentence.
Any or all of the above. If you find yourself making the statement "we couldn't fix your bug because the developer was on leave for six months" then there is something mind-bendingly wrong with your world. Six months is enough time to hire another developer to fix the bug (even if it's a temp because they're coming back). You don't just... leave it broken for six months.
Actually, it's been an "intentional problem" in companies for years. "Oh, we can't account for that $200,000 discrepancy? Must be that terrible IT Dept! Nobody else understands how the computers around here work!"
I'm oversimplifying, and exaggerating, but I've seen this play out many times: Companies intentionally cripple the IT/Software stack, making them known to be a terrible dept due to lack of resources. Then, when a problem hits "oh we're working on cleaning up the dept responsible".
And it's one that people buy, because everyone has experienced computer frustration.
I imagine we'll see more of it as time goes on. Management without a technical background depend on the expertise of their workers to get things right. They can only manage work so far but if there's bugs they can't understand or don't know how to find root cause of they'll have to point the finger eventually.
Besides, if a whole industry of software devs are going to insist on calling themselves engineers I hope they adopt the ethics and responsibility other engineers are required to undertake.
> if a whole industry of software devs are going to insist on calling themselves engineers
It's hard to see around this enormous straw man. Starting with the poor applicability of engineering-oriented project management systems to software creation, there are many reasons not to call it "engineering" even when practiced at the highest levels.
> Besides, if a whole industry of software devs are going to insist on calling themselves engineers I hope they adopt the ethics and responsibility other engineers are required to undertake.
What ethics and responsibilities do non-software engineers have that software engineers don't have?
It's officially a Big Deal in some branches of engineering- structural, mechanical, and civil come to mind. My city just built a new bridge over our river, and the engineers who signed off on its design and construction were doing so under a certain legal framework that is designed to ensure that the design was done using proper methodologies, appropriate tests were conducted, etc. If the bridge fails due to shoddy design, those engineers will personally face certain professional and legal consequences. That same legal and regulatory framework gives the engineers certain protections should management try and make them cut corners on the design or testing (in theory, anyway).
People have been debating for years about whether there ought to be a similar legal framework for software engineering. There are plenty of good arguments on both sides of that discussion, IMHO, but the sorts of situation described by the original article would fall squarely under the "pro" side of the equation. I can easily envision a world in which, for software that is critical to a public safety function of government, states had to buy software written by bonded and licensed engineers. Presumably, under such a framework, a licensed software engineering company would have to have a system in place such that their "hit by a bus factor" would be >1- i.e., they'd need to have sufficient documentation or process in place to enable any single engineer to go on extended leave without preventing critical bug-fixes from taking place.
This is obviously something that any developer would recognize as a "best practice", but that in practice is often infeasible due to organizational constraints. The advantage to a system of regulation and licensure would (in theory) be that it would empower engineers to demand such practices be in place in their organizations, and would incentivize companies to set themselves up to enable such practices. In theory. As the saying goes, "in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice." Hence why this has been an ongoing debate in the software world for decades.
Reminds me of how nobody was punished for the complete lack of security that allowed Private Manning to copy files off classified systems (open access to a CD burner). Defense contractors face heavy fines for such breaches and have their systems properly locked down but the military itself just does what it pleases and looks the other way when dumb decisions bite them.
This is a great example of the government being inefficient at getting things done. However in this case, this ended up saving tax payers money by having inmates released early.
"Early estimates indicate the offenders were released from prison an average 55 days before their correct release dates, according to Inslee’s general counsel, Nicholas Brown."
> This is a great example of the government being inefficient at getting things done.
I don't see any reason that "being government" had anything to do with this category of error. I'm also not sure that "inefficient" describes the problem.
Basically, with state bureaucracies and government procurements - politics, various forms of corruption and other non-merithorical factors can often affect the outcome. Because it's taxpayer's money that's getting spent.
Governments go with contractors due to a multi-decade effort by the economic right to promote the idea that government is less efficient than the private sector, providing strong political incentives for downsizing actual government departments.
Turns out private companies are at least as incompetent...
I'd argue that often it's also like this: 1) incompetence => ill-defined requirements; 2) being afraid of corruption accusations if non-cheapest option wins => cheapest offer wins if it matches the ill-defined spec, regardless of any other factors.
The "cheapest offer wins" is (IMO) in general not how private companies work, but very often how governmental bodies work. The clerks have nothing to gain for choosing the right option, but potentially a lot to lose.
> The "cheapest offer wins" is (IMO) in general not how private companies work.
I'd disagree with that assessment - "cheapest offer wins" is pretty much the way private companies work as well any time they can get away with it. See: procurement in any mid-to-large company, or the whole stereotype of "made in China = sucks" when it's not the fault of Chinese factories, but of companies that want to pay as little as possible for manufacturing (if they'd pay for quality production, they'd get quality products even from China).
Private companies can be as inefficient as public institutions, but it isn't talked about since they're usually wasting just their own (and their customers') money.
In the US, many government bodies are bound by law to choose the cheapest option, precisely because doing otherwise would either appear to be inefficient or favoritism.
However in this case, this ended up saving tax payers money by having inmates released early.
I hear this a bit but it doesn't seem include the cost of having criminals in the streets. At least some of them will re-offend and the sooner they're released, the younger they will be, the likelier it is that they will. With a few months across 3500 people, it can add up.
Even if they commit a crime which you believe shouldn't be a crime (some drug offence), they will consume a lot of resources while going through the legal system again.
Not to mention the legal mess this bug created that will need to be sorted out now. Highly doubtful that there were any savings here. Knowing the government operations, you'll end up paying even more.
I'm beginning to think we should entirely abolish the punishment motivation in the criminal justice system.
It negatively affects recidivism rates, creates a huge societal cost, and really serves no purpose other than vengeance for the victim.
There are many excellent aspects of United States (and other British common law descendants) law, but they were created without the psychological understanding we now have of the factors that lead to crime. The current tripartite understanding of the reasons for prison sentences (punishment, deterrence, and removal from society) is simply not an accurate reflection of the reality of how to reduce criminal activity.
Sure, there are some people that we need to just remove from society. However, these individuals who have truly incurably pathological tendencies toward illegal actions are relatively rare.
The true purpose of the prison system needs to be reform. We need an evidence-based approach to crime prevention, not one based on human instinct, or the haphazard trial and error algorithm that developed our current legal system. Criminals need to be treated for mental illness, withdrawn from substance abuse, and most importantly given the socioeconomic tools they need to cope as law abiding citizens. Anything else is a waste of resources.
Except we have no idea how to "reform" people. Even various pre-K programs return dismal results when tried at any significant scale. And these are impressionable kids, not hardened criminals.
Perhaps not coincidentally, we also have a rather poor track record of helping mental patients. You could attribute some of it to mistreatment and maltreatment but largely we just don't know what to do.
Plus even after they've served their time they still have an incredibly hard time finding work, housing, and anything else that would fall under the category of "required for life."
And then we wonder why recidivism is so fucking high.
Community service results in massively lower recidivism rates than custodial sentences (even when the original crime was the same). We're not great at reforming people (though there are a few cheap targeted interventions we should be doing at every opportunity - namely ensuring mothers are well fed during the last few months of pregnancy, and avoiding lead exposure), but replacing most prison sentences with community service would most likely massively cut crime.
Absolutely. But the goal needs to be reform. We have some idea of how to approach it (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, mandatory real time drug and alcohol monitoring, psychotropics such as antipsychotics, employable skillsets, stable housing, stable income, anger management, etc.)
We don't entirely know what to do yet, but I bet we could get a lot better at reform if that's where we focused our efforts, rather than attributing all crime to moral failing.
That'd be a great idea if psychiatry had any better idea of what moves people to commit crimes, and how to stop them doing it again, than anyone else does. And even then, it'd be a terrible idea. You're proposing psychiatry become, not just an arm of the state, but an arm of the criminal justice system, with all the baggage that implies. What in the history of the field gives you to imagine it's mature enough, with responsible enough practitioners, to be given that much potential for abuse both well-meaning and otherwise?
Has it never occurred to you (the obvious) that punishment is one of the things (if not the most important one) that keeps people from committing crimes? It's a matter of disincentive. Not only that, it's part of the reform, since it's a form of reprehension. I can't understand how you can't see what is basically common sense.
Except the punishments do not make the victim whole again, they cost society a shitload of money, and oftentimes the offenders have no idea what the consequences actually are. So, what is this for?
I'm not advocating no consequences for anything, but I think a financial penalty would be far more effective and might have a chance at actually giving the victim something besides some nebulous feeling of satisfaction, while saving us money and not costing us productive members of society who had a moment of lapsed judgement.
I've worked with a lot of ex cons. Sure you have some that are hard core criminals, but the vast, vast majority are just people who did something stupid, know it, regret it, and are branded for life for it. It sucks.
While the idea sounds straightforward, I don't believe that it's as simple as "punishment deters crime". IMHO, the deterrent effect of imprisonment is negligible; it's primary effect is to prevent those who commit crimes from committing more in the public arena by locking them up.
That's quite a pessimistic view. But if you genuinely believe some will in fact commit crime again and therefore add costs to the legal system, would those costs still be more than the taxpayer cost of room and board in a prison for 2 months?
And if, say, 10% were repeat offenders, how does this factor into the true "costs" of the legal system dealing with them, vs. the 90% who saved taxes by getting released early?
I think you'd be surprised just how much of a tax burden keeping people in prison truly is. And I think for many crimes, the odds of one of these released inmates committing crime again is much lower than you suggest. And even if they do commit a crime, that 55 days early release is going to make much difference.
> > The most recent BJS recidivism study estimated the recidivism patterns of about 400,000 persons released from state prisons in 30 states in 2005. [...]
> > In a 15 State study, over two-thirds of released prisoners were rearrested within three years
Interestingly enough, it appears that the statistics are calculated badly (hopefully not on purpose)
A recent peer reviewed study shows that just 1/3rd of offenders ever go back to prison, and 11% of offenders go back to prison more than twice. THat's far lower than we've been told.
I'm a bit confused about the downvotes for this comment.
Parent wants to know about people in prison being arrested. I provide a link that gives information about the crimes committed by people in prison.
> Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country's prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America's propensity for anger and violence.
I mentioned the legal cost separately because the largest and primary cost comes from the crimes themselves: the damage a criminal does directly (stolen goods, destroyed property, injured people) and indirectly (lowered trust in society, trauma).
Can a criminal lead to more than $30k (low end) or $100k (higher end) damage in a year? Easily. That's one drunk driver causing a single accident where someone gets hurt.
Wile it's partially because legal, incarceration, and healthcare costs are bordering on obscene in the US, I'd bet (moral issues aside) that it's still a good trade-off to keep people prone to crime in prison.
>This is a great example of the government being inefficient at getting things done.
No more than any example of private companies screwing up (which they do a lot, sometimes with thousands of deaths too) being an example of the private sector being inefficient at getting things done.
If the government instead had outsourced this system to a private contractor, who subsequently made the same mistake, would you still blame government?
Unfortunately, it's the same public scrutiny that makes public procurement not work in the first place. It prevents corrupt people choosing based on personal interest, but it also prevents people who know their stuff from cutting through marketing bullshit and buying a solution that works, instead of the cheapest one. I don't see a good solution.
What?! Washington, get with the program here! We're supposed to be the country with the longest sentences and highest prison population in the world. This 55 days early thing is wrecking it for everyone!
It is worth keeping in mind that the US has a considerably higher proportion of her population behind bars than others. Mandatory sentencing rules have lead to escalating prison terms.
Neither do mechanical sentencing rules make a country safe nor does double counting of good time make a country unsafe.
I'd like to be lazy and call this a core-competency issue, but you'd think if anything would get a corrections office to back some software work, it'd be the possibility of erroneously releasing inmates. I really have no explanation for this aside from simple negligent stupidity.
A rounding error on the release date isn't the most sensitive mistake if inmates have already done most of their time (and crime relapse is only probable because prison and reinsertion programs aren't working). Scheduling cells and inmates, tracking security cards, tracking prison risks are much more risky, they can lead to a revolt, guard assasination, etc.
Nov. 3-6: Feuer meets with the IT application manager to discuss the calculation request. Feuer is told a coding fix is scheduled for Jan. 7, 2016, and is informed that the contractual coding developer needed to make the change had been on leave from February to September.
Seems to be a classic case of the "bus factor" [1] being too low, in this case, only 1.
That sounds like a bug that should be fairly easy to catch out. If you don't write unit tests, you're going to have a bad time (or duplicate amounts of "good time" as in this case).
This could be a classic example of why unit tests (or at least striving for coverage alone and not functionality) is not good enough. What the pseudo code might have looked like:
And say all of those functions were covered 100%, then they get the new state supreme court decision changing the contents of "getTotalSentencedDays" and even wrote new tests to make sure it included the "enhancements" and what not. Coverage 100%, unit tests appear to be in order, all done. There was no "testGetReleaseDateWithGoodBehaviorNotAppliedToEnhancements". Hard to catch this stuff when you are close to the code.
I agree, although as you said, I'd see it as an example of coverage vs. functionality. Still, if I were to bet, I would put my money on that they had no test suite at all : ) It's a gamble, but I think my chances would be favorable : )
Government code? Most likely contractors wrote it. The last time I was a contractor working on government code it was a two week process to change the title of a window.
I think it may be unreasonable to assume that the requirement passed to the developer was clear and correct. The unit test is itself predicated on the belief that the requirement is clear and correct and, in my experience, this very often is not the case.
IMHO, many administrators or managers lack a strong math background and may find themselves writing requirements that involved fairly complicated arithmetic in narrative form, thus introducing considerable "gray error" and potential error. I've seen it many times in my own work.
3,200 inmates being released on average 55 days earlier with (what I found looking this up[1]) the daily cost to house inmates being $129, that would amount to about $22.7 million of savings.
On the other hand, that is 22.7 million dollars in lost revenue for the company/companies running Washington's prisons.
When viewed from that perspective, the move to recapture those released early makes a bit more sense intuitively.
What can this possibly accomplish? Presumably these people were released, probably had no idea they were released early, and now have potentially settled into their life again. Returning them to prison can only do more harm than letting it go, and seems more spite than justice.