151–160 of 434 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pay each inmate $10k for each day they're unable to leave prison past one week after the end of their sentence. Most inmates probably wouldn't mind staying a couple months longer if it means they get to leave with a million dollars in the bank, and it would correct the state's incentives.
And just would pay this? You and I the taxpayers.... so no thanks to this solution.
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…
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We know exactly how to fix it. Our cowardly politicians and toothless regulatory agencies are not up for the challenge. For every piece of software that can directly and materially harm someone's life like this, there should be a chain of responsibility. And within that chain, there should be legal recourse and, in most cases, penal consequences, especially in the case of inadequate software quality/testing/validatio…
My cynical take is that the lack of accountability is exactly what makes software enabled bureaucracy so appealing. If this true, there is no incentive to change.
It seems keeping inmates longer pays better than releasing them on time.
Imprison fewer people so that human review of life-critical software applications is faster and less costly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just how bureaucracy typically operates. Everyone knows that the system is messed up, but no one can override the system without potentially huge personal consequences. As a former prison inmate, I honestly think that most of the people affected will be quite happy with the monetary compensation that they'll receive once the courts get done with this. > seems like most of the employees of the Arizona correcti…
> But quite a few inmates have claimed to me to be guilty of crimes much worse than what they were convicted of. This is irrelevant and a dangerous ends-justification. No person's imprisonment should be justified by crimes they were not convicted of. We should not seek a justice system that punishes unprovable crimes. What percentage of rapes by prison guards (or police or CEOs or politicians) gets reported to police…
I did not say anything remotely like that. The justice system should absolutely be strictly restricted to proven offenses, and the consequences should be limited to, at max, the letter of the prescribed sentence. What I actually did was to compare atty's quite unfounded accusations that would never survive in court to some significantly better-founded accusations that would also never survive in court. It was basically just a sanity check, and was not intended to have any implications other than to put the brakes on a destructive, polarizing line of rhetoric.
> What percentage of rapes by prison guards (or police or CEOs or politicians) gets reported to police? What percentage of those reports results in a conviction?
There are cameras everywhere. The staff has to report and investigate any and every complaint about sexual abuse, even the guy that claims that aliens abducted him from his cell and raped him. They will take you to medical and administer a rape kit if you ask, because they will surely get fired if they refuse. Staff and inmates get caught all the time, but usually for consensual sex. Consensual sex is a lot easier to get away with than rape. (The caveat here is that inmates, as wards of the state, are not legally able to give consent, so when a guard gets caught having "consensual" sex with an inmate they are still prosecuted for the state-jail felony charge "improper sexual activity with a person in custody" [0][1]).
[0] https://www.ktre.com/story/32833848/affidavit-female-tdcj-co... [1] https://codes.findlaw.com/tx/penal-code/penal-sect-39-04.htm...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We know exactly how to fix it. Our cowardly politicians and toothless regulatory agencies are not up for the challenge. For every piece of software that can directly and materially harm someone's life like this, there should be a chain of responsibility. And within that chain, there should be legal recourse and, in most cases, penal consequences, especially in the case of inadequate software quality/testing/validatio…
Yeah but the cost of that chain will also rise. If I'm (or my company is) personally on the hook for bugs, then I'm going to adopt a NASA-like software quality regimen, pushing up the cost of the product. Every single part of the software stack below me, from hardware, OS, compiler toolchain, disavows responsibility so if I have to absorb all the risk, the product is going to be mind bogglingly expensive.
The other option is to accept we have mediocre software that creates a number of problems that we are willing to accept; NO, not when people's lives are at stake.
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 featur…
I mean things probably seem to the outside like “it’s just two lines of code”, but if you’re messing with the business logic of releasing prisoners I’m sure you’d want to document how things currently work pretty thoroughly (inferred requirements), test/validate, have customer sign off on the existing functionality, make your change, re-run all the testing, requirements verification, etc. There’s probably a business analyst involved, a programmer, maybe even dedicated test manager, devops (do they have an existing dev/test system?). People in the prison bureau probably take their jobs seriously on paper, don’t want this change to cause more breakage than it fixes, and expressed that in the RFP.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pay each inmate $10k for each day they're unable to leave prison past one week after the end of their sentence. Most inmates probably wouldn't mind staying a couple months longer if it means they get to leave with a million dollars in the bank, and it would correct the state's incentives.
And just would pay this? You and I the taxpayers.... so no thanks to this solution.