Since 2002, the Washington State Department of Corrections (DOC) has allowed a sentencing-calculation glitch in its computers to allow more than 3000 inmates to walk out of prison before their sentences were complete. Now the state is rounding-up ex-prisoners, in many cases after they have built back their lives, settled down, found jobs, and done all of the things, difficult things, former felons are supposed to do once they have paid their debts to society.
Last month, Governor Jay Inslee and DOC Secretary Dan Pacholke revealed that incorrectly programmed computer software had been miscalculating release dates Washington convicts sentenced to extra prison for violence related to their crimes. Although DOC employees have been aware of the problem since 2012,an assistant attorney general advised against an urgent review, allowing the error, and the early releases, to continue for three more years as a software fix was delayed repeatedly. (Yes, there is an investigation.) Finally, a fix is supposedly in the works.
None of this was the fault of the prisoners who were released early, but they are the ones being made to suffer for it. Most of those who have been out for long periods are being left alone, according to the standards for review, but for those deemed to need additional prison time, the trauma is significant. The Seattle Times interviewed Miranda Fontenot, whose fiancé, James Louis, was taken into custody last week when he checked in with his community corrections officer.
“We weren’t aware of any type of miscalculation,” said Fontenot, who waswaiting for Louis in the car with the couple’s toddler. “They just put him in handcuffs out of the blue.”
Louis had been released four months early in February 2012 from his sentence for an armed robbery. He then applied for nearly 200 jobs before finally getting one at a Seattle hotel. “He’s going to lose his job, and we depend on him,” Fontenot said.
This is an easy ethics call, as I see it. If the former inmate hasn’t violated the terms of his release or broken laws, his”owed” prison time should be waived. Oh how I hate it when incompetent government agencies make citizens suffer to solve problems created by government incompetence. Surely a lawyer can get a judge to tell the Department of Corrections, “YOU screwed up, YOU dragged your feet, YOU misled these prisoners, and you, not they, have to pay the piper. Those sentences are over, kaput, vanished, get it? Now maybe you will start fixing flaws in the system on time, since you know that you won’t be able to mess up other people’s lives to avoid the consequences of your incompetence.” To me, this seems to be a case of cruel and unusual punishment:
“Yes, you’re free! Your sentence is over! Here are your kids, here’s your home, your community is ready to accept you back—KIDDING!!! Back you go behind bars for another few months!
And—I’m sorry, but this has to be said— by all means, let’s give government more power over our lives, because they do the jobs they already have so sensitively, competently, wisely and well.
_____________________
Pointer: Fred.
Ethics Alarms 
Regarding the issue of employment by ex-inmates, I think it is far worse to advise someone they are hired and then firing them while a background check is conducted (the result of not asking the former conviction question at the beginning of the hiring process) than it is to ask the question and disqualify them from the beginning. The former is devastating to the now-ex hiree, while the latter, while disappointing to the applicant, doesn’t have such a terrible blow to the ego. It’s sorta like here’s your prize, but now you have to give it back.
And yet a recent executive order mandates exactly the opposite.
Exactly so–like a lot of “good” ideas, bad things result when the propose doesn’t think the thing through, resulting in unintended consequences. {Like just about every government give-away program.]
Which one is that?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/barack-obama-ban-the-box_5636aee8e4b00aa54a4e8c9d
“Yes, you’re free! Your sentence is over! Here are your kids…” and maybe a wife to go with … but the home (is the rent or mortgage being paid for all of a sudden? does the community accept someone who looks like a repeat offender? and the job — uh uh — gone. Try trying again, sucker.
Why are governments so incredibly inept at purchasing computer software and services? I program to calculate lengths of sentences? Read a few statutes, add, multiply, subtract, maybe apply a percentage, then have your math checked by a supervisor? Do you even need a computer program to do that for you?
You do not understand bureaucracy. There is an excellent book, now out of print, entitled “The Kidner Report: A guide to Creative Bureaucracy.” In it, he posits that the primary goal of any bureaucrat (to be fair, he says this also applies to the private sector), regardless of the mission and purpose of the organization, is the acquisition of FOSP–furniture, office space, and personnel, and he acquires the most FOSP wins. If a bureaucrat does things the easy way, he or she acquires no FOSP. I find this a great way to explain why government programs don’t work as they should. A controlling drone gathers no FOSP.
In my opinion, there is no “right” for this early release and re-incarceration problem, it never should have happened in the first place. Everything they did from the moment they wrongly released a prisoner was going to be wrong in someone’s eyes. They were damned it they re-incarcerate and they were damned if they didn’t re-incarcerate. The public should be completely outraged at this complete failure of the penal system that is put there to protect the public from criminals, replace those that put the procedures in place that eliminated common sense double checking and fix the root problems.
Technology is not the wonder tool it’s made out to be, common sense is the real wonder tool. These idiots blindly following the program could have easily used their fingers on a freaking calendar to double check the program and the early releases would never have happened.
Blind acceptance of technological “solutions” is illogical and in some cases it could be quite dangerous. Proper debugging of software before it’s released to the public is rapidly becoming a lost skill; this is clearly evident in software releases that have immediate major updates. The software companies are using the general public as their debuggers. Being professionally trained in computer and web programming and actually programming for years, I’ve talked directly with many other programmers and the root problem of many programmers is that when they are debugging a program they assume that they are just checking the correctness of the program when they should be assuming that the program IS in error and their singular job is to find those existing errors – it’s a different approach and it’s not being taught/learned properly.
When I purchase software, I tend to buy proven software that’s at least a year old or after the software updates have have tapered off. I do my research.
Amen. Most software releases seem to be nothing more than free beta tests for the issuer. Getting that way with cars as well.
“Everything they did from the moment they wrongly released a prisoner was going to be wrong in someone’s eyes. They were damned it they re-incarcerate and they were damned if they didn’t re-incarcerate.”
This is irrelevant. Anyone angry that the released criminals be re-incarcerated is in the wrong, so who cares about their outrage? Our system errs on the side of letting the guilty go, and if the system has a physical ERROR that actually does let the guilty go, then so be it.
“The public should be completely outraged at this complete failure of the penal system that is put there to protect the public from criminals, replace those that put the procedures in place that eliminated common sense double checking and fix the root problems.”
Yes, this is where the outrage ought to be. Fix the error. Though our system is designed to err on the side of letting the actual guilty go, it shouldn’t be this egregious, as most of the systems’ design to err on the side of the guilty DURING the investigation and trial process…not the punishment part.
“Technology is not the wonder tool it’s made out to be, common sense is the real wonder tool. These idiots blindly following the program could have easily used their fingers on a freaking calendar to double check the program and the early releases would never have happened.
Blind acceptance of technological “solutions” is illogical and in some cases it could be quite dangerous.”
And yet, I’ve heard arguments by the blindly loyal Keynesians and other socialists that technology would make us be able to actually have a central command economy that would actually work.