Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates

&gt; “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.<p>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.<p>It&#x27;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&#x27;s actual salary cost.)<p>At least the Department of Corrections has assigned people to do the calculations manually. That&#x27;s better, but it sounds like they just don&#x27;t have enough people on it to keep up.

Wow. I know firsthand from family how this can severely destroy someone&#x27;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&#x27;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.

When I wanted to have compiled [1] financials, PriceWaterhouseCoopers told me to pick a recognized accounting system, then change the company&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>1: compiled is the lowest of 3 standards that outside accountants can do; &quot;reviewed&quot; is higher and &quot;audited&quot; 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&#x27;s outside accountants to review PWC&#x27;s work and bring it up to audited standard.

That article just kept getting worse and worse. They mention assigning a penalty to the wrong inmate and they couldn&#x27;t fix it.<p>All of a sudden that person could no longer make calls for 30 days, and they did <i>nothing</i> wrong to get that.

Isn&#x27;t this clearly defined false imprisonment under Arizona law?<p>Here&#x27;s the relevant statute:<p><i>13-1303. Unlawful imprisonment; classification; definition<p>A. A person commits unlawful imprisonment by knowingly restraining another person.<p>B. In any prosecution for unlawful imprisonment, it is a defense that:<p>1. The restraint was accomplished by a peace officer or detention officer acting in good faith in the lawful performance of his duty; or<p>2. The defendant is a relative of the person restrained and the defendant&#x27;s sole intent is to assume lawful custody of that person and the restraint was accomplished without physical injury.<p>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.<p>D. For the purposes of this section, &quot;detention officer&quot; 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.</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.azleg.gov&#x2F;ars&#x2F;13&#x2F;01303.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.azleg.gov&#x2F;ars&#x2F;13&#x2F;01303.htm</a><p>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.

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 <i>explicitly</i> excludes violent felons[1].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;corrections.az.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;documents&#x2F;PDFs&#x2F;1310_faq_0919.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;corrections.az.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;documents&#x2F;PDF...</a>

It&#x27;s like gov system don&#x27;t even have test cases. They should, and they should be public. Why aren&#x27;t these softwares for the public open source?<p>See also: employment security sites, cannabis track and trace, driving license, etc.<p>Some of these bugs cause direct financial harm to citizens and this one is much worse!<p>Show me the test cases! Show me the code!!

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.<p>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.

Reminds of the opening scene from the 1985 movie &quot;Brazil.&quot; Computer misprints the name on an arrest warrant as the result of a (literal) bug, and nightmarish tragicomedy ensures:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wzFmPFLIH5s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wzFmPFLIH5s</a><p>Highly underrated movie, with ever more contemporary relevance.

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.<p>If it costs the prison 10x normal costs to do calculations by hand.. well, that&#x27;s the cost of business.

&gt; <i>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.</i><p>If that description is accurate, that doesn&#x27;t meet the definition of a &quot;software bug&quot;, if the software was produced before that law was passed, and not updated since.<p>The bug is in the <i>process</i> 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.<p>What if an inmate suddenly receives a pardon?

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&#x27;t make it straightforward, but give they itemized 3 separate fields and charged 185 developer hours each for them, that&#x27;s just either insane gouging or blatant corruption right? That&#x27;s nearly 400K for three fields being added.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;media.kjzz.org&#x2F;s3fs-public&#x2F;styles&#x2F;special_story_images_aspect_switcher&#x2F;public&#x2F;field&#x2F;image&#x2F;BUSINESS_DECISION_CONTRACT.JPG?itok=lTPUVDVQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;media.kjzz.org&#x2F;s3fs-public&#x2F;styles&#x2F;special_story_imag...</a>

Yeah, this sucks. It&#x27;s (unfortunately) not surprising.<p>My wife had a citation that affected our liberties. The cop even knew that he didn&#x27;t have probable cause but let the charge stand for more than a month. Nobody in the system cares. The magistrates and judges don&#x27;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&#x27;t care and even cover some of the stuff up. The DA&#x27;s office doesn&#x27;t care either.<p>IT&#x27;S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY

I&#x27;d hesitate to call this a software bug, this is a complete breakdown of planning.<p>FTA - &quot;“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.”&quot;<p>tldr; a new law was passed that allowed for a different credit schedule for days served, and the system hasn&#x27;t been updated to make that calculation.

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.

Happened to me! Probably wasn&#x27;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&#x27; attention, no one ever had an explanation. Not fun.

This is one of those &quot;bugs&quot; that is a feature for the prisons. Of course no one wants this fixed.<p>Also, proof that things that are newer aren&#x27;t better.<p>&gt; “We have a couple modules they spent millions of dollars on that we can’t use at all,” a department source said.<p>&gt; The ACIS software system replaced an older program called AIMS that had been in operation for more than three decades.

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.

EDIT: Want to clearly state that I think it&#x27;s horrible that people are being held past when they should be. The below is more of devil&#x27;s advocate view of the problem. &#x2F;EDIT<p>To add a slightly contrarian perspective, this reminds me of what I think was an old HN discussion about payroll systems.<p>One of the comments was along the lines of:<p>BEGIN QUOTE<p>You think it&#x27;s &quot;just payroll&quot;? What about the following:<p>- The person who gets paid at 6&#x2F;11ths of wage because there is a split contract<p>- 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?<p>- etc<p>END QUOTE<p>The point being, these things sometimes seem simple but can get astoundingly complex very quickly.<p>Case in point: the system is designed to track gang affiliation, personal property and health issues.<p>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&#x27;s storage area is full? And he can&#x27;t take the top bunk because he has gout(or diabetes etc) and can&#x27;t climb anything?<p>And what if even with a perfect gang tracking system, you don&#x27;t have enough &quot;bins&quot; to actually separate everyone who should be separated? How do you account for that in the system? Where do you track the &quot;gang pairing priority list&quot;?<p>And I know what some folks will say: &quot;Yeah, that&#x27;s just a rules engine that you keep separate from the code. Easy!&quot; 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.<p>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 &quot;Jailhouse Doc&quot; [0]. It&#x27;s an incredibly insightful look into JUST the medical side of prisons.<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amzn.to&#x2F;2ZJnVZG" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amzn.to&#x2F;2ZJnVZG</a>

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?

Here&#x27;s a solution:<p>Imprison fewer people so that human review of life-critical software applications is faster and less costly.

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?<p>Suddenly there is an incentive to create a verifiable and correct system on the part of the prison-industrial complex itself.

Reminds me of Russia. There&#x27;s your release date... and then there&#x27;s your court date. You aren&#x27;t released until the court date after your release date, and without a bribe that could be years. You might never get out.<p>I haven&#x27;t been there in a while, but this is how it was when I lived in Moscow.

&quot;Software Bug Keeping Hundreds of Inmates in Arizona Prisons Beyond Release Dates&quot; - 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.

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&#x27;t really fault an inmate that wasn&#x27;t willing to spend even 5 extra minutes in prison.

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&#x27;s in the interests of these companies and the prison guard unions to conveniently ignore this issue.

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 <i>something</i>) and alert the guards that my time was up.<p>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 &quot;What the fuck are you still doing here?&quot; to get me out of there.

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.

&gt;Software Bug Keeping Hundreds of Inmates in Arizona Prisons Beyond Release Dates<p>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 - &quot;software bug keeping&quot;. It isn&#x27;t software who keeps the inmates, it is the people employed in that branch of government, and ultimately it is &quot;we, the people&quot;. Blaming &quot;computer&quot; is as old an excuse as the pyramids as we still fall for it. Even more today i think.

From what I&#x27;ve read and seen about the US penal system, from this side of the pond, is that it&#x27;s a big cash cow. The cynic in me says they&#x27;re turning a blind eye for a reason.

&gt; <i>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.</i><p>So the prison administration know there are people being held that shouldn&#x27;t be held, but they are still keeping them behind bars.<p>This is not a software problem.

I will say that the sum of my misdeeds throughout my life doesn&#x27;t compare to depriving a single person of a single day of their freedom. It&#x27;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.<p>But now I&#x27;ve learned that that could, in fact, be a potential problem in the future...

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.

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.

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

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

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 &quot;Time for good behavior&quot;, skipping parole, credit for time served you can give five people a inmate&#x27;s jacket and get five different dates easily, and should rationally expect to.

&gt; the entire inmate management software program, known as ACIS, has experienced more than 14,000 bugs since it was implemented in November of 2019.<p>It&#x27;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?

I expect that Arizona will end up paying in restitution to prisoners who served too much time <i>more</i> 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.

Isn&#x27;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&#x27;t think it&#x27;s worth fixing.

&quot;Inmates walk out of prison as free people and then have to re-enter society. It&#x27;s like they&#x27;re sentenced twice.&quot;

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

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

The purpose of a system is what it does.

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

I wonder what&#x27;s the underlying software stack, mainframe? oracle?

For the sake of completeness:<p>&quot;Prisoners released early by software bug (2015)&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-35167191" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-35167191</a>

Despite this outrage, what makes this country a sustainable country is it is a country based on the rule of law.<p>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 &#x2F; early release. Yes it&#x27;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).<p>Perhaps there should be more class-action lawsuits on behalf of convicted prisoners in general.

Its not a bug

$24 million dollars and no tests to assert that &#x27;march 1 + 1 month + 15 days == April 16th&#x27;?<p>Geez..

Back in the late 90&#x27;s a bunch got released early due to Y2K. So it balances out

This isn&#x27;t a &quot;bug&quot;. The problem is the software was not designed to do this and needs to be updated to support a change in requirements<p>Bugs are when software does something it isn&#x27;t supposed to, or doesn&#x27;t do something it is supposed to. In this case, it&#x27;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 &quot;fix the bug&quot;, but this takes time.<p>&gt; They estimated fixing the SB1310 bug would take roughly 2,000 additional programming hours.<p>wtf?<p>Guessing they estimated 1 person-year, but that&#x27;s absurdly high.

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.<p>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.<p>It is time we start taking our profession seriously, own our mistakes and collectively raise the stakes foe our errors.

Peak dystopia is close.

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.<p>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.

Criminals shouldn&#x27;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.<p>Expect delays, such is the nature of legacy software.

whoops

The company in question, &quot;Business &amp; Decision NA&quot; is a French company, though their website is pretty sparse on the details: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;organization-guest&#x2F;company&#x2F;business-&amp;-decision" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;organization-guest&#x2F;company&#x2F;business...</a><p>So, some French brogrammers are preventing US citizens from being released from prison due to incompetence.