Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates • Hacker News Board

Re: Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates

#191

Post by jfengel » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 7:33 PM UTC

Enginerrrd wrote: post #147

lbriner wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 happene…

As someone with a civil engineering background: This right here is the difference between conventional engineering disciplines where designs require a Stamp from an Engineer of Record who takes on personal responsibility in the event of design failures vs. the current discipline of software engineering. There's a big difference between a software developer and a software engineer, and I think that difference should b…

I would love for software engineering as a discipline to go that way, but it's going to be very hard. Software usually has more moving parts than hardware.

I don't mean to understate the difficulty of being a hardware engineer, of any sort. But the whole reason we do things in software at all is because software is more flexible, and adding a new thing comes with less overhead. Hardware, while challenging, tends to follow similar sets of solutions to similar problems. There are only so many things a bridge, or a building, or even a CPU will be tasked to do.

Not saying this is impossible for software, either. Software gets built for man-rated tasks -- and jobs like this should be considered man-rated, because lives depend on it. That means it's going to cost more and take longer, especially when it's software of a kind nobody has ever built before. Who has experience in "software that releases prisoners?"

The reason they don't do that is, therefore, money. I doubt the prison system is willing to pay 10x as much for the software. The software was probably built by the lowest bidder technically acceptable, where "technically acceptable" was incredibly flexible because nobody really knew what had to be done.

Re: Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates

#192

Post by aksss » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 7:34 PM UTC

foerbert wrote: post #149

rjurney wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a chain. There is legal recourse. And there are considerations in government IT that you would not believe and they are incredibly difficult to deal with on minimal resources. It has to be harder than the private sector and this application isn't any different than buggy mainframe software run by major banks. It sits and gets crufty.

This is a new system that replaced a previous one not that long ago. This isn't some crazy old thing running COBAL on a VAX somewhere that nobody understands anymore.

I have no idea what that means, for newer is not necessarily more supportable. Who knows what the system is - maybe they had a multi-million dollar SAP implementation to manage prisons, and now you’re looking for functional support of that platform after it was customized all to hell, you need a-team SAP resources, not the new kid at Wipro... I can only imagine what’s behind that curtain. It’s the government so I imagine the worst.

Re: Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates

#193

Post by bondolo » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 7:34 PM UTC

frompdx wrote: post #20

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…

Little Britain's recurring bit Computer says "No", has always been a great illustration of this point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n_Ty_72Qds

Re: Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates

#194

Post by f430 » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 7:36 PM UTC

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.

Re: Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates

#195

Post by mewpmewp2 » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 7:38 PM UTC

frompdx wrote: post #20

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…

I'd argue that software like this has saved people from having to do millions of years worth of mundane work. This news is essentially like a traffic accident. Doesn't mean vehicles in general haven't benefitted the human experience. The fact that it is news worthy is evidence that it doesn't happen too often.

Re: Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates

#196

Post by aksss » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 7:38 PM UTC

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #143

Draiken wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to say that sounds exactly how this kind of software should be built. We're not talking about the newest social media hype. This software actually matters. Specially since today most of these bureaucratic processes can't be done without these softwares.

>I have to say that sounds exactly how this kind of software should be built. You see this in every topic. Every "muh pride in muh trade" person says something like this about the relevant trade but the fact of the matter is that the world runs on off-brand duct tape, harbor freight tools, walmart jeans, economy tires, and all sorts of other "value" solutions and the race to the bottom is what has given us much of th…

> the world runs on off-brand duct tape

So very, very true.

Re: Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates

#197

Post by malandrew » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 7:39 PM UTC

frompdx wrote: post #111

malandrew wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. All government software should be open source and anyone should be able to investigate th…

I agree with what you are proposing in principle. However, the notion that it is up to each individual to combat the system when it has wronged them while they languish in some kind of bureaucratic limbo is one of the core sicknesses of our system. Apart from having direct access to the source code and the ability to make pull requests, that is exactly what is happening here. The bureaucrats involved know there is a…

> However, the notion that it is up to each individual to combat the system when it has wronged them while they languish in some kind of bureaucratic limbo is one of the core sicknesses of our system.

What's the alternative though? No human system I'm aware of can address this in any cost-effective manner. Linus' Law has been demonstrated as being one of the best human approaches. The only software approach I can think of that has addressed this is fault tolerant voting systems used in avionics (NASA, SpaceX, Boing) where the cost of failure is so high that typically three independent implementations vote on the outcome. It's impractical to treat every software system used in government to be built to the same standard.

Even in some of the better run software companies (e.g. Google and Facebook), it's incredibly challenging to achieve system correctness across the entire system. There are always tradeoffs to be made and even in the most critical systems there are limits to how to practically achieve correctness.

I work at one of these better run companies specifically on measuring and guaranteeing correctness and detecting failures in correctness both in production systems (via continuous probing) and as part of change management (integration testing the change against the system in production). It's a really hard problem even for us and we have far better engineers than you find working on the overwhelming majority of government software systems.

The only alternative (and the one I prefer) is to have less government involvement so that fewer systems are involved and you can have more eyeballs scrutinizing fewer systems. Government is far too big already, and there's too strong a desire to keep making it bigger before we adequately tame the complexity we've already built. The co-dependence between two codifications: (1) the law code and (2) software code, further contributes to ossification that is almost impossible to undo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law

Re: Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates

#198

Post by kazinator » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 7:39 PM UTC

> 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?

Re: Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates

#199

Post by gumby » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #153

gumby wrote: post #83

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 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 t…

Rats, refuting my knee-jerk supposition with actual facts!

Thanks for that, actually

Re: Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates

#200

Post by frompdx » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #139

frompdx wrote: post #20

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…

> 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. This is why penalties are such an important part of the feedback loop. Obviously we can't go back in time and restore someone's phone privileges, but we can award monetary damages for the mistake. Monetary damages alone won't discourage this behavior, thoug…

Both news and social media have a strong bias toward articles that spark anger or outrage.

Absolutely, and I agree that disconnecting can have positive benefits. On the other hand, at least for me personally, covid has disrupted the mechanisms that normally prevent in depth observation. It has given me time to read books I normally would not have read because that time went to things like waiting for my car to warm up so I can get to work on time, commuting, going out to lunch with co-workers, and going out for drinks with co-workers, friends, and family.

What is described in the article is outrageous. My concerns about bureaucracy and software's role in enabling it, on the other hand, have developed separately because I have the time to consider it.