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.

Literally none of those reasons justifies keeping someone in a human cage.

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.

And just would pay this? You and I the taxpayers.... so no thanks to this solution.

All of these people should sue for false imprisonment.

How much would that cost you? And how much is a day of a free man's life worth to you?

This is a travesty and that sum of money is neither sufficient, nor unique to the GP's solution.

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.

Well, they could just be released then...

...and perhaps having a software system that handles the decision process the institutional memory/knowledge faded...

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.

Not a terrible stretch. You are probably correct.

> it could not cope with manual overrides.

Or, more likely, it lacked the manual override mechanism at all.

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.

Never forget Troy Davis. Injustice abounds.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/03/innocence-is-not...

Neither the staff or inmates know who qualifies or what their release date should be.

Apparently, they can let them out on time if they calculate the release date and enter it into the system manually.

The article does state that they are currently hand calculating the information.

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."

Time to watch idiocracy again..

1.5 million prisoners in the USA. You want to go through that list, without software?

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.

Not arguing for anything. Just observing the necessity for software. I'll leave it at that, and not put any words in your mouth.

We're talking about Arizona. And every prison likely can keep track of its own inmates. If they can't, what are they doing running a prison?

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.

The article is about Arizona, which has under 40k. I don’t want to go through that manually either.

https://www.stltoday.com/news/national/govt-and-politics/ari...

I dunno about that. With a good card catalog, that sounds pretty manageable to me. You shouldn't need to parse the whole database every day.

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.

This is a matter of administrating the law. If they're unwilling to do their job, they shouldn't have that job.

I am skeptical if the law has anything to do with the people employed in the day-to-day operations of the US prison system.

There's 1.5 million people right there who might be interested.

Even 0.07% of them, say about 1000 people, might volunteer to learn the code base and programming language.

I wouldn't do it myself, but I imagine a team of a few hundred people could get it done in a month. We're only talking about Arizona, though.