The following is very illuminating:
> Instead of fixing the bug, department sources said employees are attempting to identify qualifying inmates manually... But sources say the department isn’t even scratching the surface of the entire number of eligible inmates. “The only prisoners that are getting into programming are the squeaky wheels,” a source said, “the ones who already know they qualify or people who have family members on the outside advocating for them.”
> In the meantime, Lamoreaux confirmed the “data is being calculated manually and then entered into the system.” Department sources said this means “someone is sitting there crunching numbers with a calculator and interpreting how each of the new laws that have been passed would impact an inmate.” “It makes me sick,” one source said, noting that even the most diligent employees are capable of making math errors that could result in additional months or years in prison for an inmate. “What the hell are we doing here? People’s lives are at stake.”
Comments like yours seem to glorify a pre-software world filled with manual entry. The reality is that manual entry is even more error-prone, bias-prone, with more people falling through the cracks.
If nothing else, software can be uniformly applied at a mass scale, and audited for any and all bugs. And faulty software can be exposed through leaks like the above, to expose and fix systemic problems. Whereas a world of manual entry simply ignores vast numbers of errors and biases which are extremely hard to detect/prove, and even then, can simply be scapegoated with some unlucky individuals, without any effort to fix systemically.