But even if it was a bug... I don't understand why software would prevent somebody opening the gate and letting the inmate out...
- System needs to track sexual offenders and provide updates on their locations to relevant municipalities
- Parole officer check, requirements, and termination system needs to know who, what, and where
- Statistical record-keeping systems for sentence lengths need to be updated
- If felons, voting systems need to be kept updated
All of these sorts of actions would be triggered by someone’s release and probably involve interconnected systems that rely on truth data about the initial release.
One major thing my career in software and systems has taught me is that things are rarely as simple as they seem on the surface. I tend to approach such systems with humility.
That's a rather broad blanket statement bordering on collective punishment (which BTW is classified as a war crime by the UN). The status of taxpayer makes you a victim of the state, not necessarily someone with influence over its behavior and certainly not an ardent supporter of all its policies. The vast majority of the taxpayers had nothing to do with the situation and might well be opposed to keeping these people in prison if the facts were explained to them.
Perhaps the matter should be put to a general vote—those actually in favor of keeping the inmates in prison can split the cost of any wrongful-imprisonment suit in the event the state loses.
How much would that cost you? And how much is a day of a free man's life worth to you?
This is a travesty and that sum of money is neither sufficient, nor unique to the GP's solution.
Also, if you release someone and the system still shows them as being in there, that could lead to a very bad interaction for that person if they have any official interaction with authorities while they are out.
Not a terrible stretch. You are probably correct.
Or, more likely, it lacked the manual override mechanism at all.
Getting into prison is easy but getting out is really hard and will take you years even if everybody agrees a mistake was made.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/03/innocence-is-not...
Apparently, they can let them out on time if they calculate the release date and enter it into the system manually.
It's a full-on bureaucracy where only the computers actually know the correct full calculation for every prisoner due to the complexity of the formulas, and when the computers can't do that correctly people get screwed with no recourse because it's humanly impossible to keep up with every detail.
Even 0.07% of them, say about 1000 people, might volunteer to learn the code base and programming language.
https://www.stltoday.com/news/national/govt-and-politics/ari...
Maybe we'd have better results if inmates could file paperwork to receive the payments that would normally go to the prison for their imprisonment, starting on the date they should have been released.