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Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates

987 points by macg333 6y ago

notwhereyouare 6y ago
That article just kept getting worse and worse. They mention assigning a penalty to the wrong inmate and they couldn't fix it. All of a sudden that person could no longer make calls for 30 days, and they did nothing wrong to get that.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  “Show me the incentives, I’ll show you the outcome.” If corrections staff were held personally liable for these failures, or the local jurisdiction faced steep financial penalties, it wouldn’t happen. No liability, no responsibility.
  - blobbers 6y ago
    These are prison workers and you're asking them to run a social network (with certain constraints). They wouldn't even know the first thing about how to hire someone capable of doing this. They'd have to hire a consultant to hire another consultant.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      Corrections management is who I would consider the directly responsible party, not corrections ICs (to be clear, no scapegoats). The buck stops somewhere when we’re talking about infringing on someone’s right to freedom. Excuses are unacceptable.
      - ryandrake 6y ago
        The buck seems to stop at the computer/AI nowadays, in an alarmingly growing number institutions and companies. And you can't punish a computer or hold an AI accountable. This seems to be an end state desired by people who were previously accountable.
        sep_field 6y ago
        Don't let the people in charge skip out on accountability. If their excuse is "the computer", well, they are after all the ones that put the computer system in place and hold responsibility for its outcomes. Take action against them personally (pay cuts, firings) and they or their successors will for sure be motivated to ensure the computer works properly going forward.
        bigiain 6y ago
        It'd be nice if the rules said that if decisions are pushed off to "the computer", then whoever authorised the use of that computer/software is "responsible" for its errors. In a situation where "computer says 'No!'" but the law says 'Yes', whoever signed off on the purchase/maintannces of that computer should be held as responsible as if they'd made that decision themselves. There should be a very simple and obvious answer for any of these over-incarcerated inmates to the question "Who, as in which individual person, do I point an ambulance chasing no win no fee lawyer at for a compensation claim?"
    - whywhywhywhy 6y ago
      How did they manage to do it 20+ years ago?
      - blobbers 6y ago
        Sounds like they did it with paper. I think the general understanding of paper filing systems vs. computer systems is less specialized!
  - m463 6y ago
    > "Show me the incentives, I’ll show you the outcome." That is spot on, and generalizes well. "iot vendors make post-sales money if they collect data from their device" "phone vendors make money if they bundle terrible apps with their phone" "robocallers make lots of money, with historically no fines paid out for violations"
edoceo 6y ago
It's like gov system don't even have test cases. They should, and they should be public. Why aren't these softwares for the public open source? See also: employment security sites, cannabis track and trace, driving license, etc. Some of these bugs cause direct financial harm to citizens and this one is much worse! Show me the test cases! Show me the code!!
- sodality2 6y ago
  If my tax $ goes to it, it should have source available (excepting natsec). it would be nice to get some value out of it. If it's well written, I could learn how a large scale project works. If not, I can have something to petition and voice my concerns about, inform about vulns, etc.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    You exempt national security, and suddenly everything is national security. Look at the FISA “courts”. Not arguing against it. State secrets are needed in some instances. Just pointing out that if you exempt something, there’ll be people who’ll construe as much as they can under than exemption. Is there any solution to that?
    - sodality2 6y ago
      I suppose a congressional committee separate from the intelligence community that can (hopefully) objectively decide whether something will directly damage our national security. I agree though, it's a tough problem I haven't fully thought through. I can see an argument saying "well if a vulnerability was found and a violent felon/terrorist was released early, that would be _bad!_". Hell, a DMV appointment software could have a vulnerability allowing a drivers license to someone who then commits a terrorist act. I wouldn't put that past a politician to claim under "national security". Of course, as mentioned below, these vulnerabilities would probably be limited in scope if the devices are airgapped (which it better be!). But something tells me they likely aren't all airgapped. But I genuinely hope that if such a thing were to happen, there would be more good eyes on it than bad ones. Personally I'd look at whatever was in my preferred language. Granted, it would be to learn from it, not to find vulnerabilities, but something tells me there are vulnerabilities in gov't systems even I know are bad.
djrogers 6y ago
I'd hesitate to call this a software bug, this is a complete breakdown of planning. FTA - "“Currently this calculation is not in ACIS at all,” the report states. “ACIS can calculate 1 earned credit for every 6 days served, but this is a new calculation.”" tldr; a new law was passed that allowed for a different credit schedule for days served, and the system hasn't been updated to make that calculation.
- undecisive 6y ago
  It's the problem with silver bullets like YAGNI: Laws change, if your system is dependent on laws, then you can be sure that new rules will need to be added. You need a system that is configurable, you can be sure you are going to need it. Of course, if there's money to be made in having a change-resistant system, well that's a different story. YAGNIAYWPTTNFI (You ARE gonna need it, and you will pay through the nose for it) isn't quite as catchy though
  - Ma8ee 6y ago
    YAGNI just means that you don’t know how the laws are going to change. All the configurability you add is just going to make the system more expensive and even harder to change the day when the laws are changed, and it wasn’t anything you thought of. And no one is ever using all your nice switches.
    - undecisive 6y ago
      Yes and no. It's a bit like saying "Oh, I didn't know it was going to rain - it was lovely and sunny outside when I wrote the code". A big (some might say forgotten) part of the procurement and development process is research - know your customer, know your market, know your niche. In this case, that includes - know how prisons work - know how the system will be administered - know how recent law changes might be handled by the system - know how often prisoners need / deserve workarounds - know how quickly law changes need to be reflected in code Also, I'm not saying that the user interface needs to contain this. But we should always advocate for modular systems that are easy to maintain through addition, rather than through re-writes. If it is genuinely difficult to add a new type of inmate release schedule, then that is poor planning. But again, I'm not necessarily subscribing to that theory. Money is involved, so facts are in the eye of the sales team. But I'm also not not subscribing to that theory.
tantalor 6y ago
This isn't a "bug". The problem is the software was not designed to do this and needs to be updated to support a change in requirements Bugs are when software does something it isn't supposed to, or doesn't do something it is supposed to. In this case, it's doing exactly what it was intended to do when it was implemented and put into service. Since then things have changed, so the vendor needs to implement the feature request, not "fix the bug", but this takes time. > They estimated fixing the SB1310 bug would take roughly 2,000 additional programming hours. wtf? Guessing they estimated 1 person-year, but that's absurdly high.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  Pay the money or the inmates stay in prison for longer... weird hostage negotiation but okay...
- rileymat2 6y ago
  There is a lot of reasonable opinions on the topic, but I would consider design and requirements bugs that render the software unfit for purpose to be bugs as well.
  - lbriner 6y ago
    If they were design and requirements then fine, but you cannot consider something that was not asked or paid for as a bug. As with many cock-ups, somebody did not know enough to ask for the right thing. On top of that, someone should have been in the room to tell the State Governor that their proposed change was not supported in software and needed something out-of-band to manage it.
    - tshaddox 6y ago
      It’s still a bug, even if the project managers or software engineers are not responsible for causing the bug. I think people are just using “it’s not a bug” to mean “it’s not my fault as a member of the software engineering team.” But of course there are bugs which are not the software engineering team’s fault.
- 6y ago
atty 6y ago
The fact that they appear to have identified individuals who should be released, but have not, due to the software not being updated, is frankly disgusting. I believe holding a person against their will is a criminal act - seems like most of the employees of the Arizona correctional facilities are now guilty of crimes worse than the majority of their inmates.
- NullPrefix 6y ago
  Computer says no.
  - hnedeotes 6y ago
    I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. (and I'm not making fun of this - it's not a situation I would wish to be)
  - swayvil 6y ago
    Computer cited as authoritative basis, we see a lot of that these days. Metal hand, flesh puppet.
    - jessaustin 6y ago
      Ouch!
- hkh28 6y ago
  As an outside observer (European) this seems to be the way the American prison system is run. The inmates are not viewed as humans by the people responsible, enabling horrible conditions. Fixing such an issue should be top priority, and in the meantime, you would revert to pen and paper accounting to ensure the correct release of each prisoner.
  - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    >The inmates are not viewed as humans Easy power comes from demonizing people we don't understand or don't like. Our political parties are so addicted to animosity, they've become incapable of functioning without it.
vorpalhex 6y ago
This seems like a problem for the prison, not the inmates. In general, the prison software being faulty means the prison should just hand-calculate this as needed. The inmates should still be able to be released as appropriate. If it costs the prison 10x normal costs to do calculations by hand.. well, that's the cost of business.
- sparrish 6y ago
  And that's exactly what they're doing (according to the article)
frompdx 6y ago
This is an outrage. It is also a perfect example of how software is used to create increasingly more elaborate and faceless bureaucracies that force individuals to spend more and more time contending with them. Somehow software has become the ultimate vehicle for bureaucratic violence. Software is simultaneously infallible and the perfect scapegoat. The inmate who lost their phone privileges for 30 days is an example. They did nothing wrong but the computer says so and nothing can be done. The computer is right in the sense that its decision cannot be undone, and solely to blame since no human can undo its edict or be held accountable, apparently. It is tragic and absurd. There was an Ask HN question the other day where the poster asked if the software we are building is making the world a better place. There were hardly any replies at all. Is this because for the most part our efforts in producing software are actually doing the opposite? It certainly seems that way reading articles like this.
- ehnto 6y ago
  It's such a hard question to answer, because software doesn't exist in a vacuum. Hopefully this example is relevant: You're a software developer maintaining an eCommerce platform, on the one hand your platform helps perpetuate low margin and wasteful consumerism, on the other hand your software enables small businesses to compete in the new online world. Consumerism is bad, but commerce is as old as civilization and supports all of our lifestyles, so on a macro level you're in a tough spot. You're a talented developer putting their skills to work building something the community needs, I personally think that means you're doing good work in the context of your society, but it is difficult to say if it's making the world a better place. Social media is the same. On the one hand, it connects family and friends, on the other it drives narcissisms, consumerism and misinformation. You almost have to try and calculate the "Net Good" or "Net Bad" of a type of software and see how the cards fall. For social media I would suggest that it's currently in a "Net Bad" situation, causing more harm than good for example.
- lbriner 6y ago
  Software that infringes on the public (even if they are criminals) as opposed to software that people can opt to use or not, needs to have a very serious question asked at design time: If the software produces an incorrect result, what mechanism exists to override it/audit it/provide damages etc. The fact people are not asking that is worrying. I understand why the system was not designed to do something that happened later (even if it could have been reasonably foreseen) but the fact that it was implemented with no override is really the scandal. I don't know whether this comes down to an amount of power that exists in a Governor that means the rest of the organisation can't say, "sorry Guv, but we can't do this because the software wasn't written to". If TV is to be believed, Governors want things done yesterday and you worry about the problems.
woodruffw 6y ago
To color this even further: the hundreds of people who are illegally imprisoned are being held for drug or even just paraphernalia possession. The law that grants them credits explicitly excludes violent felons[1]. [1]: https://corrections.az.gov/sites/default/files/documents/PDFs/1310_faq_0919.pdf https://corrections.az.gov/sites/default/files/documents/PDF...
bigmattystyles 6y ago
With prison incentives being what they are, it’s hard not to think that it’s beneficial for the profession to hold on to inmates longer.
- rob74 6y ago
  I'm wondering if there isn't a business model in this: couldn't the inmates (or their families) hire some law firm that calculates the correct release date and sues the state to get a hefty compensation for every day the inmates serve longer than they should? That would turn around the incentives...
  - lasagnaphil 6y ago
    Which you’re assuming that the inmates can hire an expensive law firm in the first place.
- xen2xen1 6y ago
  Don't ascribe to malice... The dates and sentences can change so many times it's surprisingly hard to calculate. I've watched people who try earnestly to get the dates right complain about how hard it is.
  - gotostatement 6y ago
    is there a version of this that says "Dont ascribe to incompetence what is more likely caused by greed"? I'm tired of seeing comments like this that imply that any accusation of greed or malice is unfounded when in todays world, particularly in an industry like private prisons, greed is often the most likely cause.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
giantg2 6y ago
Yeah, this sucks. It's (unfortunately) not surprising. My wife had a citation that affected our liberties. The cop even knew that he didn't have probable cause but let the charge stand for more than a month. Nobody in the system cares. The magistrates and judges don't care, even though the new charge should be dismissed with prejudice over this and other rights violations. The supervisors and IA for the state police don't care and even cover some of the stuff up. The DA's office doesn't care either. IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY
- lbriner 6y ago
  In the UK, people often sue for wrongful arrest etc. and I though the US was much worse for litigation. Is it simply that the victims are mainly poor and not connected enough to sue or is the legal system there really that immune from action due to wrongful process?
  - giantg2 6y ago
    According to a civil rights lawyer I talked to, the judges for the courts don't care unless you suffered extensive monetary damages. That the DA and the judges tend to side with the cops because they work with them on other cases often. On top of that, there are so many minor rights violations and an extensive case backlog. Issues like ours are common, so the system basically overlooks them so it can process the 1-2 year case backlog (pre pandemic times even). Mix that with the public perception that if you were arrested or cited, then you must be guilty and deserve it.
neartheplain 6y ago
Reminds of the opening scene from the 1985 movie "Brazil." Computer misprints the name on an arrest warrant as the result of a (literal) bug, and nightmarish tragicomedy ensures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFmPFLIH5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFmPFLIH5s Highly underrated movie, with ever more contemporary relevance.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- aasasd 6y ago
  > On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 98% rating based on 48 reviews with an average rating of 8.7/10.
_joel 6y ago
From what I've read and seen about the US penal system, from this side of the pond, is that it's a big cash cow. The cynic in me says they're turning a blind eye for a reason.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  It's been a cash cow since the end of the Civil War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convict_leasing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convict_leasing
jdeibele 6y ago
When I wanted to have compiled [1] financials, PriceWaterhouseCoopers told me to pick a recognized accounting system, then change the company's business processes to match that. They said absolutely not to go the other way, to try to customize any software to match our business. I think about that every time I read about another government (or private!) company that wastes tens or hundreds of million of dollars (or euros or pounds) on custom software. It seems like there should be 1, 2, or 3 DMV programs. The same for building codes, tax codes, etc. And prison software. You can be more like Massachusetts or Mississippi or Montana (hypothetical examples) but pick one and harmonize with it. 1: compiled is the lowest of 3 standards that outside accountants can do; "reviewed" is higher and "audited" is the highest. Even at the compiled level they mailed out postcards to a certain number of customers asking if they were customers over the past year and had spent this much money. It was fairly easy for the acquiring company's outside accountants to review PWC's work and bring it up to audited standard.
- er4hn 6y ago
  This advice appears based on deficiencies in programming however. Programs operate on algorithms to process data. When the programs or algorithms fail to be able to do so properly the program is at fault. In your cases you have items like: accounting, building codes, tax codes, automobile codes, etc. While it makes sense to try and harmonize with the general policies, every state, every municipality, and every business is going to have special cases. Even software has edge cases for protocol behaviors. What would be nicer, imho, is if all of these laws were written in domain specific languages that specify the law and then the software could just pick up the definitions signed into law. Lawyers as they are feel like a combination of legal interpreters, combined with a combination of being red/blue security team members depending on what they are doing.
  - sterlind 6y ago
    My dad actually created a (failed) startup in the early '00s that modeled immigration law in Prolog, enabling the creation of legally accurate forms and resolving complex legal queries. It was a good idea, it just failed due to infighting and mismanagement. are there popular languages for implementing these types of DSLs?
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Well, if a judge ruled that a software bug means that you don’t get your money back if you accidentally send it out, then that same judge would probably rule that the inmates have to stay in jail due to a software bug.
- dghlsakjg 6y ago
  Aside: The difference in the Citibank case is that the money was actually owed. Citibank was in the process of trying to get out of paying it when they sent payment. Also, money can be given back, time can't.
gumby 6y ago
Arizona has private prisons (subject of civil rights lawsuits, but TBF I bet they all are). I would not be at all surprised if it's in the interests of these companies and the prison guard unions to conveniently ignore this issue.
- tzs 6y ago
  The private prison contracts I've seen published have the state pay a fixed amount for up to a certain number of prisoners, say 97% of the capacity of the facility, plus a per prisoner amount for each prisoner over that fixed amount. The numbers I've been able to find suggest that Arizona's overall state prison population is well below capacity, suggesting that it is likely that the private prisons are operating in the fixed price range of their contracts. If that is the case the prison company make more money when a prisoner is released than they do when the prisoner is retained.
  - gumby 6y ago
    Rats, refuting my knee-jerk supposition with actual facts! Thanks for that, actually
  - bigwavedave 6y ago
    While this is absolutely correct (Arizona state prisons are relatively famous for their minimum occupancy rates- Florence West, Phoenix West, and Marana Community Correctional Treatment Facility each have 100% minimum occupancy rates [1]), the one caveat I have to note is that private prisons in Arizona don't control, calculate, or have anything to do with awarding release credits and calculating release dates [2]. So, yes- you're completely right. Since they're in this situation where they get paid for 100% of their beds being filled even if they have 50%, 75%, even 97% capacity [3], the private company doesn't have much incentive to fudge release dates. Especially when the number of private bed contracts keep rising even though the total inmate population is decreasing [4]. However, by that same turn, it's been proven in court [3] that the state is on the hook for the minimum capacity % even when that capacity isn't met, and these contracts are fairly long (10 years + 2 renewable 5 year terms [5]). If the state is on the hook for up to 20 years of paying 100% to use 90% of something, there's a clear incentive to make a show of it being used. So while there's no direct way for a private prison to fudge release date calculation, there's definitely no incentive for it to press the issue with the Department of Corrections considering the DoC could renegotiate the contract the following year [6]. As for the people in state office, it does not look or feel good to squander millions on an overestimation. I'm not saying corruption is involved- all I'm saying is that there's certainly motive and opportunity for negligence. Some sources for anyone interested: [1] http://www.aublr.org/2017/11/private-prison-contracts-minimum-occupancy-clauses/ http://www.aublr.org/2017/11/private-prison-contracts-minimu... (look for source #14) [2] A.R.S. 41-1609.01#P https://law.justia.com/codes/arizona/2011/title41/section41-160901/ https://law.justia.com/codes/arizona/2011/title41/section41-... [3] MTC vs ADC https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2015/jul/31/report-finds-two-thirds-private-prison-contracts-include-lockup-quotas/ https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2015/jul/31/report-find... [4] https://kjzz.org/content/1647948/despite-declining-population-arizona-department-corrections-looking-more-private https://kjzz.org/content/1647948/despite-declining-populatio... [5] A.R.S. 41-1609.01#I,J https://law.justia.com/codes/arizona/2011/title41/section41-160901/ https://law.justia.com/codes/arizona/2011/title41/section41-... [6] A.R.S. 41-1609.01#C,D
xen2xen1 6y ago
I was once told that if I wanted to make millions of dollars instantly I should write software to just calculate jail exit dates. With "Time for good behavior", skipping parole, credit for time served you can give five people a inmate's jacket and get five different dates easily, and should rationally expect to.
1024core 6y ago
The company in question, "Business & Decision NA" is a French company, though their website is pretty sparse on the details: https://www.linkedin.com/organization-guest/company/business-&-decision https://www.linkedin.com/organization-guest/company/business... So, some French brogrammers are preventing US citizens from being released from prison due to incompetence.
- notRobot 6y ago
  Clearly you haven't read the article because it's not the programmers' faults. The software is doing what it was designed to do. The prison failed to get it updated with new requirements.
shobith 6y ago
Peak dystopia is close.
floatingatoll 6y ago
I expect that Arizona will end up paying in restitution to prisoners who served too much time more than it would have cost to have the software patch implemented by their vendor with a significant bonus offered, that decreases each week the vendor fails to deliver a working solution.
bookmarkable 6y ago
If you broke out of prison after your release date, are you breaking the law? Or refuse to go in your cell? This is some gross bureaucratic incompetence, so I couldn't really fault an inmate that wasn't willing to spend even 5 extra minutes in prison.
pmontra 6y ago
> the entire inmate management software program, known as ACIS, has experienced more than 14,000 bugs since it was implemented in November of 2019. It's been about 470 days since then. It means 29 bugs per day. At least they have in place an impressive process to report and manage bugs. Or is it 14,000 times the same bug?
jrochkind1 6y ago
What are the ethical obligations of software developers working on this project?
- platinumrad 6y ago
  They almost certainly have zero decision making power so whistleblowing and then quitting is the obvious course of action. >“It was Thanksgiving weekend,” one source recalled. “We were killing ourselves working on it, but every person associated with the software rollout begged (Deputy Director) Profiri not to go live.” >But multiple sources involved in the rollout said they were instructed by department leadership to “not say a word” about their concerns. “We were told ‘We’re too deep into it — too much money had been spent — we can’t go back now.’”
natas 6y ago
I wonder what's the underlying software stack, mainframe? oracle?
rjurney 6y ago
Reminds me of Russia. There's your release date... and then there's your court date. You aren't released until the court date after your release date, and without a bribe that could be years. You might never get out. I haven't been there in a while, but this is how it was when I lived in Moscow.
temporallobe 6y ago
I love how “mistakes” are often in your adversary’s favor, like when I canceled a gym membership and they continued to charge me for a year because of a “glitch”. Of course mistakes like these have nothing to do with software but with intentional policy decisions which can be made plausibility deniable due to software bugs.
adjkant 6y ago
Smaller point as most have covered the insanity of this, but am I reading this right that they are paying 125K for adding a field to some piece of data? I know government contracts can be bloated and there can be complications that don't make it straightforward, but give they itemized 3 separate fields and charged 185 developer hours each for them, that's just either insane gouging or blatant corruption right? That's nearly 400K for three fields being added. https://media.kjzz.org/s3fs-public/styles/special_story_images_aspect_switcher/public/field/image/BUSINESS_DECISION_CONTRACT.JPG?itok=lTPUVDVQ https://media.kjzz.org/s3fs-public/styles/special_story_imag...
grumple 6y ago
I will say that the sum of my misdeeds throughout my life doesn't compare to depriving a single person of a single day of their freedom. It's something I think about when I think of politicians who passed unjust laws, or prosecutors who pursued marijuana convictions, or judges that condemned the innocent. But now I've learned that that could, in fact, be a potential problem in the future...
totalZero 6y ago
Here's a solution: Imprison fewer people so that human review of life-critical software applications is faster and less costly.
swiley 6y ago
You have to avoid organizations that do the "computer said so" thing. They are universally pathological.
trhway 6y ago
>Software Bug Keeping Hundreds of Inmates in Arizona Prisons Beyond Release Dates language as the key as usual, it builds mental model different from reality and sets the discussion context obscuring the real issue and already skewed toward the angle the speaker wants - "software bug keeping". It isn't software who keeps the inmates, it is the people employed in that branch of government, and ultimately it is "we, the people". Blaming "computer" is as old an excuse as the pyramids as we still fall for it. Even more today i think.
king_panic 6y ago
whoops
f430 6y ago
Criminals shouldn't expect the same level of attention and care rest of the law abiding civilians expect. They can take their time addressing this software bug. Perhaps put out a public tender for bids until the end of the year for fair competition amongst local software shops who will then outsource it to a distant country over the next few years to keep as much of the capital as possible in the local community. Expect delays, such is the nature of legacy software.
kazinator 6y ago
> One of the software modules within ACIS, designed to calculate release dates for inmates, is presently unable to account for an amendment to state law that was passed in 2019. If that description is accurate, that doesn't meet the definition of a "software bug", if the software was produced before that law was passed, and not updated since. The bug is in the process of not having a plan for updating the software in a timely way when laws change, and not having a requirement in place for overriding the calculations in the interim. What if an inmate suddenly receives a pardon?
up2isomorphism 6y ago
"Software Bug Keeping Hundreds of Inmates in Arizona Prisons Beyond Release Dates" - No, it is bureaucracy and corruption that is Keeping Hundreds of Inmates in Arizona Prisons Beyond Release Dates, and anyone who has the remotest idea about how such contracts are awarded knows why.
- HappyDreamer 6y ago
  How are such contracts awarded? Would you have time to explain? I was just thinking that the executives at the prison, are clueless about software, and likely couldn't hire a competent consultancy agency, even if they wanted to. And also, that the prison execs anyway are generally ok with bugs like this one — which keeps people longer in prison. I presume the prisons make more money, with more prisoners. (Although now some prison staff need to do extra manual work, but someone wrote elsewhere that that was only for squeaky wheels prisoners, i.e. those who knew enough to complain.) And maybe the consultancy agency prefers to build software that actually never starts working completely, so they can continue billing the prisons forever? It's a bit as if the prisons, and the consultancy agency, cooperated with each other, both of them making money, by exploiting the defenseless prisoners? Was what I was thinking. What are your thoughts?
tomcam 6y ago
Happened to me! Probably wasn't a software error, and it was only for a day. But it was in Seattle, and they simply forgot me. No one brought food (even though my cellmate got it), no one acknowledged it, no one answered when I tried to get the officers' attention, no one ever had an explanation. Not fun.
njdullea 6y ago
$24 million dollars and no tests to assert that 'march 1 + 1 month + 15 days == April 16th'? Geez..
carbocation 6y ago
The purpose of a system is what it does.
vburg 6y ago
No one take responsibility. Just blame the algorithm or something. Maybe upgrade to a deep learning black box for perfect deniability.
sneak 6y ago
> The employees said they have been raising the issue internally for more than a year, but prison administrators have not acted to fix the software bug. The sources said Chief Information Officer Holly Greene and Deputy Director Joe Profiri have been aware of the problem since 2019. So the prison administration know there are people being held that shouldn't be held, but they are still keeping them behind bars. This is not a software problem.
TexasfoldsEm 6y ago
Wow. I know firsthand from family how this can severely destroy someone's mental health in what may not be so obvious; it is extremely heavy on someone every moment past the first hour they go past their release time, then the first day followed by a variety of things that will then be taken advantage of by other inmate and guards while one's defenses are down. The fun poked at by other jealous inmates and cruel guards constantly will also weigh down hard on another human being. Arizona penal system puts you into almost always into very nasty and dangerous places of incarceration. frompdx made a statement that truly made my gut feel as if I was at the top of a roller coaster I did not want to get on in the first place.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  If a prisoner knows he's past his release date, can't he contact his lawyer?
  - mulmen 6y ago
    Depends on if the computer has taken away phone privileges. I suppose a good lawyer would already know the release date and take action without being contacted? But I have no idea.
    - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      Most people who can afford good lawyers never spend a day in custody.
  - omginternets 6y ago
    I'm worried this question might get written off. I would actually like to know the answer to this as well. My immediate reaction is that either (1) it is possible, and the story is therefore more nuanced that might appear at first glance, or (2) it is not possible, and this is an even more egregious problem.
    - mulmen 6y ago
olingern 6y ago
This is one of those "bugs" that is a feature for the prisons. Of course no one wants this fixed. Also, proof that things that are newer aren't better. > “We have a couple modules they spent millions of dollars on that we can’t use at all,” a department source said. > The ACIS software system replaced an older program called AIMS that had been in operation for more than three decades.
heavenlyblue 6y ago
A close issue: I have recently realised that none of the phone operators in the UK are capable of transferring phone numbers across contracts inside the same company without cancelling them first (and you are officially on the hook for the remainder in the contract). Their systems are organised around “cancelling the contract = transferring the number”. Happened to me with Vodafone.
doomjunky 6y ago
For the sake of completeness: "Prisoners released early by software bug (2015)" https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35167191 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35167191
fractal618 6y ago
Its not a bug
mbar84 6y ago
Do the Arizona prisons get more money, the more prisoners they have and the longer they have them? Were these same prisons responsible for the procurement of this software? Is the software perhaps working as intended?
wombatpm 6y ago
Back in the late 90's a bunch got released early due to Y2K. So it balances out
spoonjim 6y ago
Make this a statutory $10,000 per day penalty, issued to the software vendor and bonded by an insurance company as a procurement requirement, and it will stop happening.
elihu 6y ago
> “When they legislate these things, they need to be appropriating enough money to make sure they work,” a source said. They estimated fixing the SB1310 bug would take roughly 2,000 additional programming hours. 40 hours a week times 52 weeks is 2080 hours. Subtract a few weeks for vacations and holidays, and you get a little less that 2000 hours. So, basically, this is a little more than one programmer-year of effort if the estimate is in the right ballpark. It's gross that the decision not to fix this carries an apparent implicit economic calculation that one programmer-year is more valuable than the freedom that is being denied to an unknown number of people whom society deems less important. (Granted the actual situation is more complicated and the state is constrained by their contract with the vendor, which we can reasonably guess is going to charge as much as they can contractually get away with rather than the programmer's actual salary cost.) At least the Department of Corrections has assigned people to do the calculations manually. That's better, but it sounds like they just don't have enough people on it to keep up.
- rsj_hn 6y ago
  > It's gross that the decision not to fix this carries an apparent implicit economic calculation Spending money will remain economic decision until we can have government agencies fueled by the righteous indignation of their critics rather than having a line item added to their budget. Until you can convert that indignation into legal tender, agencies will remain subject to old fashioned accounting constraints.
  - craig131 6y ago
    The onerous budget item we are talking about here is a feature that multiply days sentenced by 0.7 if the inmate completes one checkbox item. You know, just to keep things in perspective.
    - rsj_hn 6y ago
      Right, so that's just * a UI change to check the box this information is on * UI change to view whether the box is already checked or not * a data model change to store the information * business logic change that modifies some critical code that calculates when someone should be released * security/access control change to decide who is allowed to check this box * auditing logic to keep logs of this stuff * possibly new UI/management code to add/remove members to this group of people who can check the box * together with adding some procedures for tracking who completes what, documentation, training and auditing. * Testing the whole thing. Probably for piles of who knows what where the original author is long gone and the test code is no longer functional. Just to keep things in perspective.
fortran77 6y ago
In reality, cruel, incompetent, and careless administrators kept hundreds of inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates.
averageuser 6y ago
"Inmates walk out of prison as free people and then have to re-enter society. It's like they're sentenced twice."
tmsh 6y ago
Despite this outrage, what makes this country a sustainable country is it is a country based on the rule of law. There should be a class action lawsuit filed and those who let it slide should be responsible, including compensation for those held beyond their sentence / early release. Yes it's easy to say and there are few champions for prisoners in our society. But it is how we fix these types of issues (i.e., petitioning for harm in court), regardless of the origin (software or otherwise). Perhaps there should be more class-action lawsuits on behalf of convicted prisoners in general.
alex_young 6y ago
Isn't this clearly defined false imprisonment under Arizona law? Here's the relevant statute: 13-1303. Unlawful imprisonment; classification; definition A. A person commits unlawful imprisonment by knowingly restraining another person. B. In any prosecution for unlawful imprisonment, it is a defense that: 1. The restraint was accomplished by a peace officer or detention officer acting in good faith in the lawful performance of his duty; or 2. The defendant is a relative of the person restrained and the defendant's sole intent is to assume lawful custody of that person and the restraint was accomplished without physical injury. C. Unlawful imprisonment is a class 6 felony unless the victim is released voluntarily by the defendant without physical injury in a safe place before arrest in which case it is a class 1 misdemeanor. D. For the purposes of this section, "detention officer" means a person other than an elected official who is employed by a county, city or town and who is responsible for the supervision, protection, care, custody or control of inmates in a county or municipal correctional institution. Detention officer does not include counselors or secretarial, clerical or professionally trained personnel. https://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/01303.htm https://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/01303.htm Assumption being that a detention officer is not acting in good faith if they have a list of people who should no longer be detained under state law.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  Their list is of people eligible for a program that would give them an early release, so unless the inmate enrolls the prison would be acting in good faith. Almost like the law was intentionally worded to limit their liability.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  You’re assuming that agents of the government are expected to follow their own laws. Those laws are for you and me, not our beknighted public servants.
- bigwavedave 6y ago
  > Isn't this clearly defined false imprisonment under Arizona law? > Assumption being that a detention officer is not acting in good faith if they have a list of people who should no longer be detained under state law. I agree with your premise and assertion, but I'm not sure that's exactly what's happening here. I'd like to preface this by saying I absolutely believe there need to be ramifications; I'm just not sure that it fits "clearly defined false imprisonment." I think a category would have to be added to the false imprisonment statute for "negligence" for this to be considered false imprisonment and let me tell you why: From what I can tell, this article is talking about a couple of massive issues but the wrongful imprisonment bit is about a specific bug (SB1310) in ACIS that can't calculate an updated release date for inmates that complete special programs that award additional release credits as per an amendment signed into law in 2019. Since they can't automatically update a release date for individuals that have completed this program, they keep track of it manually. To me, the article doesn't read like they have a list of people who should be released but aren't being released because the software says so; from my very limited perspective it reads like there are certain programs an inmate can complete to earn extra release credits and since the system can't track these extra credits, the detention officers do it manually. I would imagine their manual process goes something like this: 1) Compile list of inmates that have earned extra release credits through the aforementioned release programming. 2) Select inmate from list, possibly in order of original release date, earliest first. 3) Calculate the amount of release credits they received from completion of the programming. 4) Calculate the total hours those credits equal. 5) Deduct hours from release date. 6) Manually update the release date in ACIS (likely requiring warden and/or judicial approval, but idk). 6a) Since ACIS now has the appropriate release date, the inmate will be processed for release now (if the date has passed) or as they normally would be. 6b) Remove inmate's name from list unless currently enrolled in early release programming, in which case they are moved to the bottom of the queue. 7) Lather, rinse, repeat. Being denied release because of a software error would be hellish for both an inmate and their loved ones... But because it doesn't seem like they have an actual list of people that should have already been released but haven't been because the software made a critical oversight, I don't think it fits the legislation as it exists today for false imprisonment. The tool is broken so they've switched to manual calculation until someone more important decides it's worth fixing. If we add negligence to the false imprisonment statute, I'd agree wholeheartedly! But IA[very_much]NAL, so I'll confess I don't really know anything about anything. EDIT: formatting
atoav 6y ago
I think it is time for programmers to go to jail, when something like this happens. Just like in civil engineering when the bridge you built collapses and kills people. I am a programmer myself. The shit you can get away with by claiming a software error is ridiculous and quite frankly dangerous. A bureacracies dream is being able to blame every bad outcome on a software error. We all know software errors are like a higher force, divine intervention, natural catastrophes — nothing can be done about them. It is time we start taking our profession seriously, own our mistakes and collectively raise the stakes foe our errors.
mulmen 6y ago
Could something like this be fixed by leveraging the existing incentives? Something like if an inmate challenges the output of the system then they will automatically be released in, say, 90 days unless the output of the system can be validated manually, perhaps by a third party? Suddenly there is an incentive to create a verifiable and correct system on the part of the prison-industrial complex itself.
- parsecs 6y ago
  There doesn't seem to be any incentive against challenging, so what's to prevent some black box bureaucratic software pipeline to take in any challenge and automatically label them as "verified"? Any "third party" that doesn't belong to the prison-industrial complex becomes part of it if they get involved with this.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    As I said, manual review. As in, make the system easy to audit or get crushed by mounting costs. The idea is to apply pressure back on the prisons to get this right in the first place. If they can't demonstrate correctness to the courts (reviewed by the defense) then the sentence is dropped.
alexpotato 6y ago
EDIT: Want to clearly state that I think it's horrible that people are being held past when they should be. The below is more of devil's advocate view of the problem. /EDIT To add a slightly contrarian perspective, this reminds me of what I think was an old HN discussion about payroll systems. One of the comments was along the lines of: BEGIN QUOTE You think it's "just payroll"? What about the following: - The person who gets paid at 6/11ths of wage because there is a split contract - Or the guy who gets three pay checks because he retired so gets a pension, is a contractor and is working for two different departments? - etc END QUOTE The point being, these things sometimes seem simple but can get astoundingly complex very quickly. Case in point: the system is designed to track gang affiliation, personal property and health issues. What about the guy who is in a gang now but was in a different gang last year? And his stuff is in another block because his block's storage area is full? And he can't take the top bunk because he has gout(or diabetes etc) and can't climb anything? And what if even with a perfect gang tracking system, you don't have enough "bins" to actually separate everyone who should be separated? How do you account for that in the system? Where do you track the "gang pairing priority list"? And I know what some folks will say: "Yeah, that's just a rules engine that you keep separate from the code. Easy!" Ok. So how do you version control the rules engine? Do you build a dryrun option to see what a small tweak to the rules do? In my experience, probably not. Long story short, jails are incredibly complex environments with a multitude of complex dimensions to account for. If you are curious about this, I highly recommend reading "Jailhouse Doc" [0]. It's an incredibly insightful look into JUST the medical side of prisons. [0] - https://amzn.to/2ZJnVZG https://amzn.to/2ZJnVZG
- zelon88 6y ago
  > What about the guy who is in a gang now but was in a different gang last year? And his stuff is in another block because his block's storage area is full? And he can't take the top bunk because he has gout(or diabetes etc) and can't climb anything? Having a lot of unique edge cases is not really an excuse to not even attempt an adequate solution. Everything is manageable if you have a high enough view of everything. > Do you build a dryrun option to see what a small tweak to the rules do? In my experience, probably not. In MRP systems this is done regularly. I'm sure it's done regularly with most logistics software as well. Scheduling is an inherently difficult problem in computer science not unlike the traveling salesmen problem. There are algorithms you can employ to reduce your workload in solving the problem, but in high stakes systems even the best algorithms are going to employ at least one validation run if not several brute force attempts. In MRP systems most software has features to enable multiple schedules. So you have a production schedule, and a playground environment for finding your best opportunity cost. > Long story short, jails are incredibly complex environments with a multitude of complex dimensions to account for. If you are curious about this, I highly recommend reading "Jailhouse Doc" [0]. It's an incredibly insightful look into JUST the medical side of prisons. Bill Gates once said he liked to find lazy engineers to solve complex problems because they usually find a simple solution. In my experience, if the solution to a problem isn't programmatically obvious, you need to stop thinking in tangible items (or in this case, people) and start thinking in object oriented terms. For example, it is usually possible to turn a one-and-done conditional statement into a loop. There is a way to scale just about any program, you just need to view the problem from a higher altitude.
causality0 6y ago
Isn't not fixing this deliberately falsifying records and hence a criminal act? This is like having a physical date stamp whose counter is stuck on the wrong day and choosing to keep stamping the wrong date on paperwork because you don't think it's worth fixing.
black6 6y ago
When I was in jail a couple decades ago all inmates had barcoded wristbands which were scanned three times a day for accountability. On the day I was to be released I fully expected the booper to make a different sound (or something) and alert the guards that my time was up. Nope. It beeped like normal and the guard moved on to the next inmate in line. What was I supposed to do---tell the guards that I was supposed to be released? Riiiiight. It took the actions of a guard I had befriended early on to see me later and say "What the fuck are you still doing here?" to get me out of there.
audiometry 6y ago
Could someone get the raw records themselves, codify the release date logic, and generate their own predicted release date? If so, you could somewhat automate this, or at least allow incarcerated people to cross check their own situation by providing their data. If you can automate this, you could allow extensive lawsuits to pressure the penal system to get this disgusting problem solved.

987 points by macg333 6y ago

That article just kept getting worse and worse. They mention assigning a penalty to the wrong inmate and they couldn't fix it. All of a sudden that person could no longer make calls for 30 days, and they did nothing wrong to get that.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
“Show me the incentives, I’ll show you the outcome.” If corrections staff were held personally liable for these failures, or the local jurisdiction faced steep financial penalties, it wouldn’t happen. No liability, no responsibility.
- blobbers 6y ago
  These are prison workers and you're asking them to run a social network (with certain constraints). They wouldn't even know the first thing about how to hire someone capable of doing this. They'd have to hire a consultant to hire another consultant.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Corrections management is who I would consider the directly responsible party, not corrections ICs (to be clear, no scapegoats). The buck stops somewhere when we’re talking about infringing on someone’s right to freedom. Excuses are unacceptable.
    - ryandrake 6y ago
      The buck seems to stop at the computer/AI nowadays, in an alarmingly growing number institutions and companies. And you can't punish a computer or hold an AI accountable. This seems to be an end state desired by people who were previously accountable.
      - sep_field 6y ago
        Don't let the people in charge skip out on accountability. If their excuse is "the computer", well, they are after all the ones that put the computer system in place and hold responsibility for its outcomes. Take action against them personally (pay cuts, firings) and they or their successors will for sure be motivated to ensure the computer works properly going forward.
      - bigiain 6y ago
        It'd be nice if the rules said that if decisions are pushed off to "the computer", then whoever authorised the use of that computer/software is "responsible" for its errors. In a situation where "computer says 'No!'" but the law says 'Yes', whoever signed off on the purchase/maintannces of that computer should be held as responsible as if they'd made that decision themselves. There should be a very simple and obvious answer for any of these over-incarcerated inmates to the question "Who, as in which individual person, do I point an ambulance chasing no win no fee lawyer at for a compensation claim?"
  - whywhywhywhy 6y ago
    How did they manage to do it 20+ years ago?
    - blobbers 6y ago
      Sounds like they did it with paper. I think the general understanding of paper filing systems vs. computer systems is less specialized!
- m463 6y ago
  > "Show me the incentives, I’ll show you the outcome." That is spot on, and generalizes well. "iot vendors make post-sales money if they collect data from their device" "phone vendors make money if they bundle terrible apps with their phone" "robocallers make lots of money, with historically no fines paid out for violations"

edoceo 6y ago

It's like gov system don't even have test cases. They should, and they should be public. Why aren't these softwares for the public open source? See also: employment security sites, cannabis track and trace, driving license, etc. Some of these bugs cause direct financial harm to citizens and this one is much worse! Show me the test cases! Show me the code!!

sodality2 6y ago
If my tax $ goes to it, it should have source available (excepting natsec). it would be nice to get some value out of it. If it's well written, I could learn how a large scale project works. If not, I can have something to petition and voice my concerns about, inform about vulns, etc.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  You exempt national security, and suddenly everything is national security. Look at the FISA “courts”. Not arguing against it. State secrets are needed in some instances. Just pointing out that if you exempt something, there’ll be people who’ll construe as much as they can under than exemption. Is there any solution to that?
  - sodality2 6y ago
    I suppose a congressional committee separate from the intelligence community that can (hopefully) objectively decide whether something will directly damage our national security. I agree though, it's a tough problem I haven't fully thought through. I can see an argument saying "well if a vulnerability was found and a violent felon/terrorist was released early, that would be _bad!_". Hell, a DMV appointment software could have a vulnerability allowing a drivers license to someone who then commits a terrorist act. I wouldn't put that past a politician to claim under "national security". Of course, as mentioned below, these vulnerabilities would probably be limited in scope if the devices are airgapped (which it better be!). But something tells me they likely aren't all airgapped. But I genuinely hope that if such a thing were to happen, there would be more good eyes on it than bad ones. Personally I'd look at whatever was in my preferred language. Granted, it would be to learn from it, not to find vulnerabilities, but something tells me there are vulnerabilities in gov't systems even I know are bad.

djrogers 6y ago

I'd hesitate to call this a software bug, this is a complete breakdown of planning. FTA - "“Currently this calculation is not in ACIS at all,” the report states. “ACIS can calculate 1 earned credit for every 6 days served, but this is a new calculation.”" tldr; a new law was passed that allowed for a different credit schedule for days served, and the system hasn't been updated to make that calculation.

undecisive 6y ago
It's the problem with silver bullets like YAGNI: Laws change, if your system is dependent on laws, then you can be sure that new rules will need to be added. You need a system that is configurable, you can be sure you are going to need it. Of course, if there's money to be made in having a change-resistant system, well that's a different story. YAGNIAYWPTTNFI (You ARE gonna need it, and you will pay through the nose for it) isn't quite as catchy though
- Ma8ee 6y ago
  YAGNI just means that you don’t know how the laws are going to change. All the configurability you add is just going to make the system more expensive and even harder to change the day when the laws are changed, and it wasn’t anything you thought of. And no one is ever using all your nice switches.
  - undecisive 6y ago
    Yes and no. It's a bit like saying "Oh, I didn't know it was going to rain - it was lovely and sunny outside when I wrote the code". A big (some might say forgotten) part of the procurement and development process is research - know your customer, know your market, know your niche. In this case, that includes - know how prisons work - know how the system will be administered - know how recent law changes might be handled by the system - know how often prisoners need / deserve workarounds - know how quickly law changes need to be reflected in code Also, I'm not saying that the user interface needs to contain this. But we should always advocate for modular systems that are easy to maintain through addition, rather than through re-writes. If it is genuinely difficult to add a new type of inmate release schedule, then that is poor planning. But again, I'm not necessarily subscribing to that theory. Money is involved, so facts are in the eye of the sales team. But I'm also not not subscribing to that theory.

tantalor 6y ago

This isn't a "bug". The problem is the software was not designed to do this and needs to be updated to support a change in requirements Bugs are when software does something it isn't supposed to, or doesn't do something it is supposed to. In this case, it's doing exactly what it was intended to do when it was implemented and put into service. Since then things have changed, so the vendor needs to implement the feature request, not "fix the bug", but this takes time. > They estimated fixing the SB1310 bug would take roughly 2,000 additional programming hours. wtf? Guessing they estimated 1 person-year, but that's absurdly high.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
Pay the money or the inmates stay in prison for longer... weird hostage negotiation but okay...
rileymat2 6y ago
There is a lot of reasonable opinions on the topic, but I would consider design and requirements bugs that render the software unfit for purpose to be bugs as well.
- lbriner 6y ago
  If they were design and requirements then fine, but you cannot consider something that was not asked or paid for as a bug. As with many cock-ups, somebody did not know enough to ask for the right thing. On top of that, someone should have been in the room to tell the State Governor that their proposed change was not supported in software and needed something out-of-band to manage it.
  - tshaddox 6y ago
    It’s still a bug, even if the project managers or software engineers are not responsible for causing the bug. I think people are just using “it’s not a bug” to mean “it’s not my fault as a member of the software engineering team.” But of course there are bugs which are not the software engineering team’s fault.
6y ago

atty 6y ago

The fact that they appear to have identified individuals who should be released, but have not, due to the software not being updated, is frankly disgusting. I believe holding a person against their will is a criminal act - seems like most of the employees of the Arizona correctional facilities are now guilty of crimes worse than the majority of their inmates.

NullPrefix 6y ago
Computer says no.
- hnedeotes 6y ago
  I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. (and I'm not making fun of this - it's not a situation I would wish to be)
- swayvil 6y ago
  Computer cited as authoritative basis, we see a lot of that these days. Metal hand, flesh puppet.
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    Ouch!
hkh28 6y ago
As an outside observer (European) this seems to be the way the American prison system is run. The inmates are not viewed as humans by the people responsible, enabling horrible conditions. Fixing such an issue should be top priority, and in the meantime, you would revert to pen and paper accounting to ensure the correct release of each prisoner.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  >The inmates are not viewed as humans Easy power comes from demonizing people we don't understand or don't like. Our political parties are so addicted to animosity, they've become incapable of functioning without it.

vorpalhex 6y ago

This seems like a problem for the prison, not the inmates. In general, the prison software being faulty means the prison should just hand-calculate this as needed. The inmates should still be able to be released as appropriate. If it costs the prison 10x normal costs to do calculations by hand.. well, that's the cost of business.

sparrish 6y ago
And that's exactly what they're doing (according to the article)

frompdx 6y ago

This is an outrage. It is also a perfect example of how software is used to create increasingly more elaborate and faceless bureaucracies that force individuals to spend more and more time contending with them. Somehow software has become the ultimate vehicle for bureaucratic violence. Software is simultaneously infallible and the perfect scapegoat. The inmate who lost their phone privileges for 30 days is an example. They did nothing wrong but the computer says so and nothing can be done. The computer is right in the sense that its decision cannot be undone, and solely to blame since no human can undo its edict or be held accountable, apparently. It is tragic and absurd. There was an Ask HN question the other day where the poster asked if the software we are building is making the world a better place. There were hardly any replies at all. Is this because for the most part our efforts in producing software are actually doing the opposite? It certainly seems that way reading articles like this.

ehnto 6y ago
It's such a hard question to answer, because software doesn't exist in a vacuum. Hopefully this example is relevant: You're a software developer maintaining an eCommerce platform, on the one hand your platform helps perpetuate low margin and wasteful consumerism, on the other hand your software enables small businesses to compete in the new online world. Consumerism is bad, but commerce is as old as civilization and supports all of our lifestyles, so on a macro level you're in a tough spot. You're a talented developer putting their skills to work building something the community needs, I personally think that means you're doing good work in the context of your society, but it is difficult to say if it's making the world a better place. Social media is the same. On the one hand, it connects family and friends, on the other it drives narcissisms, consumerism and misinformation. You almost have to try and calculate the "Net Good" or "Net Bad" of a type of software and see how the cards fall. For social media I would suggest that it's currently in a "Net Bad" situation, causing more harm than good for example.
lbriner 6y ago
Software that infringes on the public (even if they are criminals) as opposed to software that people can opt to use or not, needs to have a very serious question asked at design time: If the software produces an incorrect result, what mechanism exists to override it/audit it/provide damages etc. The fact people are not asking that is worrying. I understand why the system was not designed to do something that happened later (even if it could have been reasonably foreseen) but the fact that it was implemented with no override is really the scandal. I don't know whether this comes down to an amount of power that exists in a Governor that means the rest of the organisation can't say, "sorry Guv, but we can't do this because the software wasn't written to". If TV is to be believed, Governors want things done yesterday and you worry about the problems.

woodruffw 6y ago

To color this even further: the hundreds of people who are illegally imprisoned are being held for drug or even just paraphernalia possession. The law that grants them credits explicitly excludes violent felons[1]. [1]: https://corrections.az.gov/sites/default/files/documents/PDFs/1310_faq_0919.pdf https://corrections.az.gov/sites/default/files/documents/PDF...

bigmattystyles 6y ago

With prison incentives being what they are, it’s hard not to think that it’s beneficial for the profession to hold on to inmates longer.

rob74 6y ago
I'm wondering if there isn't a business model in this: couldn't the inmates (or their families) hire some law firm that calculates the correct release date and sues the state to get a hefty compensation for every day the inmates serve longer than they should? That would turn around the incentives...
- lasagnaphil 6y ago
  Which you’re assuming that the inmates can hire an expensive law firm in the first place.
xen2xen1 6y ago
Don't ascribe to malice... The dates and sentences can change so many times it's surprisingly hard to calculate. I've watched people who try earnestly to get the dates right complain about how hard it is.
- gotostatement 6y ago
  is there a version of this that says "Dont ascribe to incompetence what is more likely caused by greed"? I'm tired of seeing comments like this that imply that any accusation of greed or malice is unfounded when in todays world, particularly in an industry like private prisons, greed is often the most likely cause.

deleted 6y ago

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giantg2 6y ago

Yeah, this sucks. It's (unfortunately) not surprising. My wife had a citation that affected our liberties. The cop even knew that he didn't have probable cause but let the charge stand for more than a month. Nobody in the system cares. The magistrates and judges don't care, even though the new charge should be dismissed with prejudice over this and other rights violations. The supervisors and IA for the state police don't care and even cover some of the stuff up. The DA's office doesn't care either. IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY

lbriner 6y ago
In the UK, people often sue for wrongful arrest etc. and I though the US was much worse for litigation. Is it simply that the victims are mainly poor and not connected enough to sue or is the legal system there really that immune from action due to wrongful process?
- giantg2 6y ago
  According to a civil rights lawyer I talked to, the judges for the courts don't care unless you suffered extensive monetary damages. That the DA and the judges tend to side with the cops because they work with them on other cases often. On top of that, there are so many minor rights violations and an extensive case backlog. Issues like ours are common, so the system basically overlooks them so it can process the 1-2 year case backlog (pre pandemic times even). Mix that with the public perception that if you were arrested or cited, then you must be guilty and deserve it.

neartheplain 6y ago

Reminds of the opening scene from the 1985 movie "Brazil." Computer misprints the name on an arrest warrant as the result of a (literal) bug, and nightmarish tragicomedy ensures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFmPFLIH5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFmPFLIH5s Highly underrated movie, with ever more contemporary relevance.

deleted 6y ago
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aasasd 6y ago
> On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 98% rating based on 48 reviews with an average rating of 8.7/10.

_joel 6y ago

From what I've read and seen about the US penal system, from this side of the pond, is that it's a big cash cow. The cynic in me says they're turning a blind eye for a reason.

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
It's been a cash cow since the end of the Civil War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convict_leasing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convict_leasing

jdeibele 6y ago

When I wanted to have compiled [1] financials, PriceWaterhouseCoopers told me to pick a recognized accounting system, then change the company's business processes to match that. They said absolutely not to go the other way, to try to customize any software to match our business. I think about that every time I read about another government (or private!) company that wastes tens or hundreds of million of dollars (or euros or pounds) on custom software. It seems like there should be 1, 2, or 3 DMV programs. The same for building codes, tax codes, etc. And prison software. You can be more like Massachusetts or Mississippi or Montana (hypothetical examples) but pick one and harmonize with it. 1: compiled is the lowest of 3 standards that outside accountants can do; "reviewed" is higher and "audited" is the highest. Even at the compiled level they mailed out postcards to a certain number of customers asking if they were customers over the past year and had spent this much money. It was fairly easy for the acquiring company's outside accountants to review PWC's work and bring it up to audited standard.

er4hn 6y ago
This advice appears based on deficiencies in programming however. Programs operate on algorithms to process data. When the programs or algorithms fail to be able to do so properly the program is at fault. In your cases you have items like: accounting, building codes, tax codes, automobile codes, etc. While it makes sense to try and harmonize with the general policies, every state, every municipality, and every business is going to have special cases. Even software has edge cases for protocol behaviors. What would be nicer, imho, is if all of these laws were written in domain specific languages that specify the law and then the software could just pick up the definitions signed into law. Lawyers as they are feel like a combination of legal interpreters, combined with a combination of being red/blue security team members depending on what they are doing.
- sterlind 6y ago
  My dad actually created a (failed) startup in the early '00s that modeled immigration law in Prolog, enabling the creation of legally accurate forms and resolving complex legal queries. It was a good idea, it just failed due to infighting and mismanagement. are there popular languages for implementing these types of DSLs?

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Well, if a judge ruled that a software bug means that you don’t get your money back if you accidentally send it out, then that same judge would probably rule that the inmates have to stay in jail due to a software bug.

dghlsakjg 6y ago
Aside: The difference in the Citibank case is that the money was actually owed. Citibank was in the process of trying to get out of paying it when they sent payment. Also, money can be given back, time can't.

gumby 6y ago

Arizona has private prisons (subject of civil rights lawsuits, but TBF I bet they all are). I would not be at all surprised if it's in the interests of these companies and the prison guard unions to conveniently ignore this issue.

tzs 6y ago
The private prison contracts I've seen published have the state pay a fixed amount for up to a certain number of prisoners, say 97% of the capacity of the facility, plus a per prisoner amount for each prisoner over that fixed amount. The numbers I've been able to find suggest that Arizona's overall state prison population is well below capacity, suggesting that it is likely that the private prisons are operating in the fixed price range of their contracts. If that is the case the prison company make more money when a prisoner is released than they do when the prisoner is retained.
- gumby 6y ago
  Rats, refuting my knee-jerk supposition with actual facts! Thanks for that, actually
- bigwavedave 6y ago
  While this is absolutely correct (Arizona state prisons are relatively famous for their minimum occupancy rates- Florence West, Phoenix West, and Marana Community Correctional Treatment Facility each have 100% minimum occupancy rates [1]), the one caveat I have to note is that private prisons in Arizona don't control, calculate, or have anything to do with awarding release credits and calculating release dates [2]. So, yes- you're completely right. Since they're in this situation where they get paid for 100% of their beds being filled even if they have 50%, 75%, even 97% capacity [3], the private company doesn't have much incentive to fudge release dates. Especially when the number of private bed contracts keep rising even though the total inmate population is decreasing [4]. However, by that same turn, it's been proven in court [3] that the state is on the hook for the minimum capacity % even when that capacity isn't met, and these contracts are fairly long (10 years + 2 renewable 5 year terms [5]). If the state is on the hook for up to 20 years of paying 100% to use 90% of something, there's a clear incentive to make a show of it being used. So while there's no direct way for a private prison to fudge release date calculation, there's definitely no incentive for it to press the issue with the Department of Corrections considering the DoC could renegotiate the contract the following year [6]. As for the people in state office, it does not look or feel good to squander millions on an overestimation. I'm not saying corruption is involved- all I'm saying is that there's certainly motive and opportunity for negligence. Some sources for anyone interested: [1] http://www.aublr.org/2017/11/private-prison-contracts-minimum-occupancy-clauses/ http://www.aublr.org/2017/11/private-prison-contracts-minimu... (look for source #14) [2] A.R.S. 41-1609.01#P https://law.justia.com/codes/arizona/2011/title41/section41-160901/ https://law.justia.com/codes/arizona/2011/title41/section41-... [3] MTC vs ADC https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2015/jul/31/report-finds-two-thirds-private-prison-contracts-include-lockup-quotas/ https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2015/jul/31/report-find... [4] https://kjzz.org/content/1647948/despite-declining-population-arizona-department-corrections-looking-more-private https://kjzz.org/content/1647948/despite-declining-populatio... [5] A.R.S. 41-1609.01#I,J https://law.justia.com/codes/arizona/2011/title41/section41-160901/ https://law.justia.com/codes/arizona/2011/title41/section41-... [6] A.R.S. 41-1609.01#C,D

xen2xen1 6y ago

I was once told that if I wanted to make millions of dollars instantly I should write software to just calculate jail exit dates. With "Time for good behavior", skipping parole, credit for time served you can give five people a inmate's jacket and get five different dates easily, and should rationally expect to.

1024core 6y ago

The company in question, "Business & Decision NA" is a French company, though their website is pretty sparse on the details: https://www.linkedin.com/organization-guest/company/business-&-decision https://www.linkedin.com/organization-guest/company/business... So, some French brogrammers are preventing US citizens from being released from prison due to incompetence.

notRobot 6y ago
Clearly you haven't read the article because it's not the programmers' faults. The software is doing what it was designed to do. The prison failed to get it updated with new requirements.

shobith 6y ago

Peak dystopia is close.

floatingatoll 6y ago

I expect that Arizona will end up paying in restitution to prisoners who served too much time more than it would have cost to have the software patch implemented by their vendor with a significant bonus offered, that decreases each week the vendor fails to deliver a working solution.

bookmarkable 6y ago

If you broke out of prison after your release date, are you breaking the law? Or refuse to go in your cell? This is some gross bureaucratic incompetence, so I couldn't really fault an inmate that wasn't willing to spend even 5 extra minutes in prison.

pmontra 6y ago

> the entire inmate management software program, known as ACIS, has experienced more than 14,000 bugs since it was implemented in November of 2019. It's been about 470 days since then. It means 29 bugs per day. At least they have in place an impressive process to report and manage bugs. Or is it 14,000 times the same bug?

jrochkind1 6y ago

What are the ethical obligations of software developers working on this project?

platinumrad 6y ago
They almost certainly have zero decision making power so whistleblowing and then quitting is the obvious course of action. >“It was Thanksgiving weekend,” one source recalled. “We were killing ourselves working on it, but every person associated with the software rollout begged (Deputy Director) Profiri not to go live.” >But multiple sources involved in the rollout said they were instructed by department leadership to “not say a word” about their concerns. “We were told ‘We’re too deep into it — too much money had been spent — we can’t go back now.’”

natas 6y ago

I wonder what's the underlying software stack, mainframe? oracle?

rjurney 6y ago

Reminds me of Russia. There's your release date... and then there's your court date. You aren't released until the court date after your release date, and without a bribe that could be years. You might never get out. I haven't been there in a while, but this is how it was when I lived in Moscow.

temporallobe 6y ago

I love how “mistakes” are often in your adversary’s favor, like when I canceled a gym membership and they continued to charge me for a year because of a “glitch”. Of course mistakes like these have nothing to do with software but with intentional policy decisions which can be made plausibility deniable due to software bugs.

adjkant 6y ago

Smaller point as most have covered the insanity of this, but am I reading this right that they are paying 125K for adding a field to some piece of data? I know government contracts can be bloated and there can be complications that don't make it straightforward, but give they itemized 3 separate fields and charged 185 developer hours each for them, that's just either insane gouging or blatant corruption right? That's nearly 400K for three fields being added. https://media.kjzz.org/s3fs-public/styles/special_story_images_aspect_switcher/public/field/image/BUSINESS_DECISION_CONTRACT.JPG?itok=lTPUVDVQ https://media.kjzz.org/s3fs-public/styles/special_story_imag...

grumple 6y ago

I will say that the sum of my misdeeds throughout my life doesn't compare to depriving a single person of a single day of their freedom. It's something I think about when I think of politicians who passed unjust laws, or prosecutors who pursued marijuana convictions, or judges that condemned the innocent. But now I've learned that that could, in fact, be a potential problem in the future...

totalZero 6y ago

Here's a solution: Imprison fewer people so that human review of life-critical software applications is faster and less costly.

swiley 6y ago

You have to avoid organizations that do the "computer said so" thing. They are universally pathological.

trhway 6y ago

>Software Bug Keeping Hundreds of Inmates in Arizona Prisons Beyond Release Dates language as the key as usual, it builds mental model different from reality and sets the discussion context obscuring the real issue and already skewed toward the angle the speaker wants - "software bug keeping". It isn't software who keeps the inmates, it is the people employed in that branch of government, and ultimately it is "we, the people". Blaming "computer" is as old an excuse as the pyramids as we still fall for it. Even more today i think.

king_panic 6y ago

whoops

f430 6y ago

Criminals shouldn't expect the same level of attention and care rest of the law abiding civilians expect. They can take their time addressing this software bug. Perhaps put out a public tender for bids until the end of the year for fair competition amongst local software shops who will then outsource it to a distant country over the next few years to keep as much of the capital as possible in the local community. Expect delays, such is the nature of legacy software.

kazinator 6y ago

> One of the software modules within ACIS, designed to calculate release dates for inmates, is presently unable to account for an amendment to state law that was passed in 2019. If that description is accurate, that doesn't meet the definition of a "software bug", if the software was produced before that law was passed, and not updated since. The bug is in the process of not having a plan for updating the software in a timely way when laws change, and not having a requirement in place for overriding the calculations in the interim. What if an inmate suddenly receives a pardon?

up2isomorphism 6y ago

"Software Bug Keeping Hundreds of Inmates in Arizona Prisons Beyond Release Dates" - No, it is bureaucracy and corruption that is Keeping Hundreds of Inmates in Arizona Prisons Beyond Release Dates, and anyone who has the remotest idea about how such contracts are awarded knows why.

HappyDreamer 6y ago
How are such contracts awarded? Would you have time to explain? I was just thinking that the executives at the prison, are clueless about software, and likely couldn't hire a competent consultancy agency, even if they wanted to. And also, that the prison execs anyway are generally ok with bugs like this one — which keeps people longer in prison. I presume the prisons make more money, with more prisoners. (Although now some prison staff need to do extra manual work, but someone wrote elsewhere that that was only for squeaky wheels prisoners, i.e. those who knew enough to complain.) And maybe the consultancy agency prefers to build software that actually never starts working completely, so they can continue billing the prisons forever? It's a bit as if the prisons, and the consultancy agency, cooperated with each other, both of them making money, by exploiting the defenseless prisoners? Was what I was thinking. What are your thoughts?

tomcam 6y ago

Happened to me! Probably wasn't a software error, and it was only for a day. But it was in Seattle, and they simply forgot me. No one brought food (even though my cellmate got it), no one acknowledged it, no one answered when I tried to get the officers' attention, no one ever had an explanation. Not fun.

njdullea 6y ago

$24 million dollars and no tests to assert that 'march 1 + 1 month + 15 days == April 16th'? Geez..

carbocation 6y ago

The purpose of a system is what it does.

vburg 6y ago

No one take responsibility. Just blame the algorithm or something. Maybe upgrade to a deep learning black box for perfect deniability.

sneak 6y ago

> The employees said they have been raising the issue internally for more than a year, but prison administrators have not acted to fix the software bug. The sources said Chief Information Officer Holly Greene and Deputy Director Joe Profiri have been aware of the problem since 2019. So the prison administration know there are people being held that shouldn't be held, but they are still keeping them behind bars. This is not a software problem.

TexasfoldsEm 6y ago

Wow. I know firsthand from family how this can severely destroy someone's mental health in what may not be so obvious; it is extremely heavy on someone every moment past the first hour they go past their release time, then the first day followed by a variety of things that will then be taken advantage of by other inmate and guards while one's defenses are down. The fun poked at by other jealous inmates and cruel guards constantly will also weigh down hard on another human being. Arizona penal system puts you into almost always into very nasty and dangerous places of incarceration. frompdx made a statement that truly made my gut feel as if I was at the top of a roller coaster I did not want to get on in the first place.

WalterBright 6y ago
If a prisoner knows he's past his release date, can't he contact his lawyer?
- mulmen 6y ago
  Depends on if the computer has taken away phone privileges. I suppose a good lawyer would already know the release date and take action without being contacted? But I have no idea.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    Most people who can afford good lawyers never spend a day in custody.
- omginternets 6y ago
  I'm worried this question might get written off. I would actually like to know the answer to this as well. My immediate reaction is that either (1) it is possible, and the story is therefore more nuanced that might appear at first glance, or (2) it is not possible, and this is an even more egregious problem.
  - mulmen 6y ago

olingern 6y ago

This is one of those "bugs" that is a feature for the prisons. Of course no one wants this fixed. Also, proof that things that are newer aren't better. > “We have a couple modules they spent millions of dollars on that we can’t use at all,” a department source said. > The ACIS software system replaced an older program called AIMS that had been in operation for more than three decades.

heavenlyblue 6y ago

A close issue: I have recently realised that none of the phone operators in the UK are capable of transferring phone numbers across contracts inside the same company without cancelling them first (and you are officially on the hook for the remainder in the contract). Their systems are organised around “cancelling the contract = transferring the number”. Happened to me with Vodafone.

doomjunky 6y ago

For the sake of completeness: "Prisoners released early by software bug (2015)" https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35167191 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35167191

fractal618 6y ago

Its not a bug

mbar84 6y ago

Do the Arizona prisons get more money, the more prisoners they have and the longer they have them? Were these same prisons responsible for the procurement of this software? Is the software perhaps working as intended?

wombatpm 6y ago

Back in the late 90's a bunch got released early due to Y2K. So it balances out

spoonjim 6y ago

Make this a statutory $10,000 per day penalty, issued to the software vendor and bonded by an insurance company as a procurement requirement, and it will stop happening.

elihu 6y ago

> “When they legislate these things, they need to be appropriating enough money to make sure they work,” a source said. They estimated fixing the SB1310 bug would take roughly 2,000 additional programming hours. 40 hours a week times 52 weeks is 2080 hours. Subtract a few weeks for vacations and holidays, and you get a little less that 2000 hours. So, basically, this is a little more than one programmer-year of effort if the estimate is in the right ballpark. It's gross that the decision not to fix this carries an apparent implicit economic calculation that one programmer-year is more valuable than the freedom that is being denied to an unknown number of people whom society deems less important. (Granted the actual situation is more complicated and the state is constrained by their contract with the vendor, which we can reasonably guess is going to charge as much as they can contractually get away with rather than the programmer's actual salary cost.) At least the Department of Corrections has assigned people to do the calculations manually. That's better, but it sounds like they just don't have enough people on it to keep up.

rsj_hn 6y ago
> It's gross that the decision not to fix this carries an apparent implicit economic calculation Spending money will remain economic decision until we can have government agencies fueled by the righteous indignation of their critics rather than having a line item added to their budget. Until you can convert that indignation into legal tender, agencies will remain subject to old fashioned accounting constraints.
- craig131 6y ago
  The onerous budget item we are talking about here is a feature that multiply days sentenced by 0.7 if the inmate completes one checkbox item. You know, just to keep things in perspective.
  - rsj_hn 6y ago
    Right, so that's just * a UI change to check the box this information is on * UI change to view whether the box is already checked or not * a data model change to store the information * business logic change that modifies some critical code that calculates when someone should be released * security/access control change to decide who is allowed to check this box * auditing logic to keep logs of this stuff * possibly new UI/management code to add/remove members to this group of people who can check the box * together with adding some procedures for tracking who completes what, documentation, training and auditing. * Testing the whole thing. Probably for piles of who knows what where the original author is long gone and the test code is no longer functional. Just to keep things in perspective.

fortran77 6y ago

In reality, cruel, incompetent, and careless administrators kept hundreds of inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates.

averageuser 6y ago

"Inmates walk out of prison as free people and then have to re-enter society. It's like they're sentenced twice."

tmsh 6y ago

Despite this outrage, what makes this country a sustainable country is it is a country based on the rule of law. There should be a class action lawsuit filed and those who let it slide should be responsible, including compensation for those held beyond their sentence / early release. Yes it's easy to say and there are few champions for prisoners in our society. But it is how we fix these types of issues (i.e., petitioning for harm in court), regardless of the origin (software or otherwise). Perhaps there should be more class-action lawsuits on behalf of convicted prisoners in general.

alex_young 6y ago

Isn't this clearly defined false imprisonment under Arizona law? Here's the relevant statute: 13-1303. Unlawful imprisonment; classification; definition A. A person commits unlawful imprisonment by knowingly restraining another person. B. In any prosecution for unlawful imprisonment, it is a defense that: 1. The restraint was accomplished by a peace officer or detention officer acting in good faith in the lawful performance of his duty; or 2. The defendant is a relative of the person restrained and the defendant's sole intent is to assume lawful custody of that person and the restraint was accomplished without physical injury. C. Unlawful imprisonment is a class 6 felony unless the victim is released voluntarily by the defendant without physical injury in a safe place before arrest in which case it is a class 1 misdemeanor. D. For the purposes of this section, "detention officer" means a person other than an elected official who is employed by a county, city or town and who is responsible for the supervision, protection, care, custody or control of inmates in a county or municipal correctional institution. Detention officer does not include counselors or secretarial, clerical or professionally trained personnel. https://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/01303.htm https://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/01303.htm Assumption being that a detention officer is not acting in good faith if they have a list of people who should no longer be detained under state law.

boomboomsubban 6y ago
Their list is of people eligible for a program that would give them an early release, so unless the inmate enrolls the prison would be acting in good faith. Almost like the law was intentionally worded to limit their liability.
chordalkeyboard 6y ago
You’re assuming that agents of the government are expected to follow their own laws. Those laws are for you and me, not our beknighted public servants.
bigwavedave 6y ago
> Isn't this clearly defined false imprisonment under Arizona law? > Assumption being that a detention officer is not acting in good faith if they have a list of people who should no longer be detained under state law. I agree with your premise and assertion, but I'm not sure that's exactly what's happening here. I'd like to preface this by saying I absolutely believe there need to be ramifications; I'm just not sure that it fits "clearly defined false imprisonment." I think a category would have to be added to the false imprisonment statute for "negligence" for this to be considered false imprisonment and let me tell you why: From what I can tell, this article is talking about a couple of massive issues but the wrongful imprisonment bit is about a specific bug (SB1310) in ACIS that can't calculate an updated release date for inmates that complete special programs that award additional release credits as per an amendment signed into law in 2019. Since they can't automatically update a release date for individuals that have completed this program, they keep track of it manually. To me, the article doesn't read like they have a list of people who should be released but aren't being released because the software says so; from my very limited perspective it reads like there are certain programs an inmate can complete to earn extra release credits and since the system can't track these extra credits, the detention officers do it manually. I would imagine their manual process goes something like this: 1) Compile list of inmates that have earned extra release credits through the aforementioned release programming. 2) Select inmate from list, possibly in order of original release date, earliest first. 3) Calculate the amount of release credits they received from completion of the programming. 4) Calculate the total hours those credits equal. 5) Deduct hours from release date. 6) Manually update the release date in ACIS (likely requiring warden and/or judicial approval, but idk). 6a) Since ACIS now has the appropriate release date, the inmate will be processed for release now (if the date has passed) or as they normally would be. 6b) Remove inmate's name from list unless currently enrolled in early release programming, in which case they are moved to the bottom of the queue. 7) Lather, rinse, repeat. Being denied release because of a software error would be hellish for both an inmate and their loved ones... But because it doesn't seem like they have an actual list of people that should have already been released but haven't been because the software made a critical oversight, I don't think it fits the legislation as it exists today for false imprisonment. The tool is broken so they've switched to manual calculation until someone more important decides it's worth fixing. If we add negligence to the false imprisonment statute, I'd agree wholeheartedly! But IA[very_much]NAL, so I'll confess I don't really know anything about anything. EDIT: formatting

atoav 6y ago

I think it is time for programmers to go to jail, when something like this happens. Just like in civil engineering when the bridge you built collapses and kills people. I am a programmer myself. The shit you can get away with by claiming a software error is ridiculous and quite frankly dangerous. A bureacracies dream is being able to blame every bad outcome on a software error. We all know software errors are like a higher force, divine intervention, natural catastrophes — nothing can be done about them. It is time we start taking our profession seriously, own our mistakes and collectively raise the stakes foe our errors.

mulmen 6y ago

Could something like this be fixed by leveraging the existing incentives? Something like if an inmate challenges the output of the system then they will automatically be released in, say, 90 days unless the output of the system can be validated manually, perhaps by a third party? Suddenly there is an incentive to create a verifiable and correct system on the part of the prison-industrial complex itself.

parsecs 6y ago
There doesn't seem to be any incentive against challenging, so what's to prevent some black box bureaucratic software pipeline to take in any challenge and automatically label them as "verified"? Any "third party" that doesn't belong to the prison-industrial complex becomes part of it if they get involved with this.
- mulmen 6y ago
  As I said, manual review. As in, make the system easy to audit or get crushed by mounting costs. The idea is to apply pressure back on the prisons to get this right in the first place. If they can't demonstrate correctness to the courts (reviewed by the defense) then the sentence is dropped.

alexpotato 6y ago

EDIT: Want to clearly state that I think it's horrible that people are being held past when they should be. The below is more of devil's advocate view of the problem. /EDIT To add a slightly contrarian perspective, this reminds me of what I think was an old HN discussion about payroll systems. One of the comments was along the lines of: BEGIN QUOTE You think it's "just payroll"? What about the following: - The person who gets paid at 6/11ths of wage because there is a split contract - Or the guy who gets three pay checks because he retired so gets a pension, is a contractor and is working for two different departments? - etc END QUOTE The point being, these things sometimes seem simple but can get astoundingly complex very quickly. Case in point: the system is designed to track gang affiliation, personal property and health issues. What about the guy who is in a gang now but was in a different gang last year? And his stuff is in another block because his block's storage area is full? And he can't take the top bunk because he has gout(or diabetes etc) and can't climb anything? And what if even with a perfect gang tracking system, you don't have enough "bins" to actually separate everyone who should be separated? How do you account for that in the system? Where do you track the "gang pairing priority list"? And I know what some folks will say: "Yeah, that's just a rules engine that you keep separate from the code. Easy!" Ok. So how do you version control the rules engine? Do you build a dryrun option to see what a small tweak to the rules do? In my experience, probably not. Long story short, jails are incredibly complex environments with a multitude of complex dimensions to account for. If you are curious about this, I highly recommend reading "Jailhouse Doc" [0]. It's an incredibly insightful look into JUST the medical side of prisons. [0] - https://amzn.to/2ZJnVZG https://amzn.to/2ZJnVZG

zelon88 6y ago
> What about the guy who is in a gang now but was in a different gang last year? And his stuff is in another block because his block's storage area is full? And he can't take the top bunk because he has gout(or diabetes etc) and can't climb anything? Having a lot of unique edge cases is not really an excuse to not even attempt an adequate solution. Everything is manageable if you have a high enough view of everything. > Do you build a dryrun option to see what a small tweak to the rules do? In my experience, probably not. In MRP systems this is done regularly. I'm sure it's done regularly with most logistics software as well. Scheduling is an inherently difficult problem in computer science not unlike the traveling salesmen problem. There are algorithms you can employ to reduce your workload in solving the problem, but in high stakes systems even the best algorithms are going to employ at least one validation run if not several brute force attempts. In MRP systems most software has features to enable multiple schedules. So you have a production schedule, and a playground environment for finding your best opportunity cost. > Long story short, jails are incredibly complex environments with a multitude of complex dimensions to account for. If you are curious about this, I highly recommend reading "Jailhouse Doc" [0]. It's an incredibly insightful look into JUST the medical side of prisons. Bill Gates once said he liked to find lazy engineers to solve complex problems because they usually find a simple solution. In my experience, if the solution to a problem isn't programmatically obvious, you need to stop thinking in tangible items (or in this case, people) and start thinking in object oriented terms. For example, it is usually possible to turn a one-and-done conditional statement into a loop. There is a way to scale just about any program, you just need to view the problem from a higher altitude.

causality0 6y ago

Isn't not fixing this deliberately falsifying records and hence a criminal act? This is like having a physical date stamp whose counter is stuck on the wrong day and choosing to keep stamping the wrong date on paperwork because you don't think it's worth fixing.

black6 6y ago

When I was in jail a couple decades ago all inmates had barcoded wristbands which were scanned three times a day for accountability. On the day I was to be released I fully expected the booper to make a different sound (or something) and alert the guards that my time was up. Nope. It beeped like normal and the guard moved on to the next inmate in line. What was I supposed to do---tell the guards that I was supposed to be released? Riiiiight. It took the actions of a guard I had befriended early on to see me later and say "What the fuck are you still doing here?" to get me out of there.

audiometry 6y ago

Could someone get the raw records themselves, codify the release date logic, and generate their own predicted release date? If so, you could somewhat automate this, or at least allow incarcerated people to cross check their own situation by providing their data. If you can automate this, you could allow extensive lawsuits to pressure the penal system to get this disgusting problem solved.