[HN Gopher] Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona ...
___________________________________________________________________
Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond
release dates
Author : macg333
Score : 784 points
Date : 2021-02-22 15:57 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kjzz.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (kjzz.org)
| bookmarkable wrote:
| 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't really fault an
| inmate that wasn't willing to spend even 5 extra minutes in
| prison.
| djrogers wrote:
| I'd hesitate to call this a software bug, this is a complete
| breakdown of planning.
|
| FTA - ""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.""
|
| tldr; a new law was passed that allowed for a different credit
| schedule for days served, and the system hasn't been updated to
| make that calculation.
| undecisive wrote:
| It's the problem with silver bullets like YAGNI: Laws change,
| if your system is dependent on laws, then you can be sure that
| new rules will need to be added. You need a system that is
| configurable, you can be sure you are going to need it.
|
| Of course, if there's money to be made in having a change-
| resistant system, well that's a different story. YAGNIAYWPTTNFI
| (You ARE gonna need it, and you will pay through the nose for
| it) isn't quite as catchy though
| Ma8ee wrote:
| YAGNI just means that you don't know how the laws are going
| to change. All the configurability you add is just going to
| make the system more expensive and even harder to change the
| day when the laws are changed, and it wasn't anything you
| thought of. And no one is ever using all your nice switches.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Now we can place configurable smart contracts on blockchaim
| that keep track of your prisoners!
|
| PrisonChain(c)
| zepto wrote:
| > if your system is dependent on laws, then you can be sure
| that new rules will need to be added. You need a system that
| is configurable, you can be sure you are going to need it.
|
| This doesn't violate YAGNI.
|
| 1. You'd have to know in advance what the scope of rule
| changes would be in order to implement the configuration
| system.
|
| Human laws do not fit this constraint.
|
| 2. You'd also need a way to prove that the configuration
| system itself was sound.
|
| 3. You'd need a way to test configurations to make sure they
| executed as expected.
|
| That is likely to be no better than just updating the
| codebase as requirements change, and there are many ways it
| could increase the cost.
| readams wrote:
| You'd need a configuration system that is so general it would
| become a programming language. And then nobody could
| configure it except the original programmers because now your
| rules are written in the weird badly-designed programming
| language you developed.
| [deleted]
| mbar84 wrote:
| 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?
| tantalor wrote:
| 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 feature request, not "fix the bug", but
| this takes time.
|
| > They estimated fixing the SB1310 bug would take roughly 2,000
| additional programming hours.
|
| wtf?
|
| Guessing they estimated 1 person-year, but that's absurdly high.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Pay the money or the inmates stay in prison for longer... weird
| hostage negotiation but okay...
| rileymat2 wrote:
| There is a lot of reasonable opinions on the topic, but I would
| consider design and requirements bugs that render the software
| unfit for purpose to be bugs as well.
| lbriner wrote:
| If they were design and requirements then fine, but you
| cannot consider something that was not asked or paid for as a
| bug. As with many cock-ups, somebody did not know enough to
| ask for the right thing.
|
| On top of that, someone should have been in the room to tell
| the State Governor that their proposed change was not
| supported in software and needed something out-of-band to
| manage it.
| tshaddox wrote:
| It's still a bug, even if the project managers or software
| engineers are not responsible for causing the bug. I think
| people are just using "it's not a bug" to mean "it's not my
| fault as a member of the software engineering team." But of
| course there are bugs which are not the software
| engineering team's fault.
| plif wrote:
| Seems high, but this is par for the course for this type of
| work. You would usually estimate this in terms of months for a
| team. Let's say a team of 4 for simplicity -- that brings it to
| ~3 months.
|
| I'd also be careful with the term "programming hours". I'm not
| sure how the news article got that or who said that initially,
| but it seems like a misrepresentation of the type of work
| needed. That estimate almost certainly includes everything
| involved in getting the code to production. You can imagine
| that means a lot of QA, red tape and holding the code's hand
| through environments.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Sounds like the QA wasn't very good from the beginning
| considering the number of actual bugs reported.
| plif wrote:
| Not trying to defend anyone, but I'm sure we can find many
| other reasons why there are so many bugs here unrelated to
| QA :)
| worik wrote:
| What is QA if it cannot be blamed for low quality?
| vntok wrote:
| If the specs are bad, QA will find low quality spots of
| undefined behaviour (anything goes, ergo it's fine), or
| even actual logic issues in the specs.
|
| However the software is coded to specs, not to QA's own
| desires, so the bugs stay.
| londons_explore wrote:
| 1 person-year is pretty much the smallest labor unit when
| quoting for modifications to government contracts.
|
| If the government wants to change the logo on the login screen,
| they're gonna pay 1 person-year. Why would I quote less? It'll
| take over 1 person-year for another contractor to pick up and
| start supporting the codebase, and we won't support a codebase
| that another contractor has touched.
|
| It's just the nature of government IT. Lowball the initial
| quote, then charge massively for any modifications and support
| now they're locked in.
| caturopath wrote:
| We did tons of tiny contracts when I was working in
| government contracting (DOD/DOE).
| deefour wrote:
| Okay?
| caturopath wrote:
| So my experience (government contracts have a floor of an
| person-year) doesn't match my experience with government
| contracts.
| [deleted]
| mywittyname wrote:
| Once you've executed on enough of these contracts, you
| develop an idea of what the unknown-unknowns are and plan for
| them.
|
| It's government work, which automatically means access
| issues, dozens (or hundreds) of stakeholders requesting
| meetings, internal politicking, back-and-forth over change
| requests, etc. All of that costs real money and if you don't
| plan for it or make contingencies, you're going to be
| screwed.
|
| These issues are not just limited to government either; any
| sufficiently large entity will have these same problems. So
| yeah, one person-year is a reasonable minimum viable contract
| period unless you have a process in place to fast-track RFP
| approval.
| tester756 wrote:
| I heard that relatively smart govs stopped doing stuff like
| this that the outsource whole projects, but now they "borrow"
| programmers e.g "give me 20 programmers with higher edu and 5
| years of experience" and we will lead this project.
|
| but I'm not sure how's the reality.
| crummybowley wrote:
| But even if it was a bug... I don't understand why _software_
| would prevent somebody opening the gate and letting the inmate
| out...
| andi999 wrote:
| Time to watch idiocracy again..
| giantg2 wrote:
| Without the software, how will they know it's time to
| release?
|
| 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.
| worik wrote:
| You assume that not only was there a bug in the software
| (in that it had not been updated to follow the law) but
| also it was terribly designed in that it could not cope
| with manual overrides.
|
| Not a terrible stretch. You are probably correct.
| anticensor wrote:
| > it could not cope with manual overrides.
|
| Or, more likely, it lacked the manual override mechanism
| _at all_.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| None of those problems cited are the problems of the
| inmate/ex-con. It's the state that is choosing to go ahead
| with implementing buggy software affecting people's
| freedom, it's the state's duty to make things right.
| code_duck wrote:
| Neither the staff or inmates know who qualifies or what their
| release date should be.
|
| Apparently, they can let them out on time if they calculate
| the release date and enter it into the system manually.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I have done some reading about people who got convicted
| wrongfully. Being released from US prison is an extremely
| bureaucratic and slow process where nobody seems to be
| willing to apply some judgement. As long as the process was
| followed everything is fine even if it's blindingly obvious
| that the person is innocent.
|
| Getting into prison is easy but getting out is really hard
| and will take you years even if everybody agrees a mistake
| was made.
| macintux wrote:
| Never forget Troy Davis. Injustice abounds.
|
| https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/03/innocence-is-
| not...
| tssva wrote:
| The article does state that they are currently hand
| calculating the information.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| They might only know that it is not calculating some
| sentences correctly. That does mean they have figured out
| little more beyond "we know it is wrong."
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 1.5 million prisoners in the USA. You want to go through that
| list, without software?
| ironmagma wrote:
| We're talking about Arizona. And every prison likely can
| keep track of its own inmates. If they can't, what are they
| doing running a prison?
| anticensor wrote:
| The imprisonment data is coordinated between the prison,
| the police, the prosecution, the public service system
| and local governments. All of them needs to be up-to-
| date, or somebody would be screwed in process.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| If the list is public, we can at least do the math
| independently to hold corrections departments accountable
| (filing suit to release eligible inmates when corrections
| won't voluntarily release because of "software enhancements
| waiting to be built").
| Firehawke wrote:
| Not that simple. There are behavioral factors that can
| affect a prisoner's status and that particular
| information would never be public.
|
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I agree it's not simple. I am advocating for activist
| (engineering, political, etc) efforts against The
| Bureaucracy. Public data is a component of that, from a
| transparency and accountability perspective, very similar
| to FOIAing everything you can get your hands on (ie
| muckrock.com). You want to be able to "show your work" in
| broad daylight.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| There's 1.5 million people right there who might be
| interested.
|
| Even 0.07% of them, say about 1000 people, might volunteer
| to learn the code base and programming language.
| lostlogin wrote:
| The article is about Arizona, which has under 40k. I don't
| want to go through that manually either.
|
| https://www.stltoday.com/news/national/govt-and-
| politics/ari...
| klyrs wrote:
| I dunno about that. With a good card catalog, that sounds
| pretty manageable to me. You shouldn't need to parse the
| whole database every day.
| code_duck wrote:
| I wouldn't do it myself, but I imagine a team of a few
| hundred people could get it done in a month. We're only
| talking about Arizona, though.
| tshaddox wrote:
| No, I want the presumably thousands of people who work at
| prisons to each go through their list of prisoners and
| determine when prisoners should be released, using the
| assistance of software but not completely deferring to
| software.
| eptcyka wrote:
| People working at prisons have no incentive to be kind or
| instill any kind of humanity in their actions, thus I
| would expect having them go through their list of
| prisoners and determine when prisoners should be released
| to have just as cynical a result as relying on broken
| software.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I don't understand why that's your default presumption.
| Although I don't have any data about this, my impression
| is that generally people are aware of how long their
| prison sentences are and are released from prison when
| they are supposed to be.
| klyrs wrote:
| This is a matter of administrating the law. If they're
| unwilling to do their job, they shouldn't have that job.
| eptcyka wrote:
| I am skeptical if the law has anything to do with the
| people employed in the day-to-day operations of the US
| prison system.
| jessaustin wrote:
| This is a somewhat horrific argument for draconian
| imprisonment.
|
| 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.
| incanus77 wrote:
| Not picking on this comment in particular and not a domain
| expert, but just a few ideas:
|
| - 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.
| worik wrote:
| ...and perhaps having a software system that handles the
| decision process the institutional memory/knowledge
| faded...
| snicker7 wrote:
| Literally none of those reasons justifies keeping someone
| in a human cage.
| anchpop wrote:
| 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.
| jacob2484 wrote:
| And just would pay this? You and I the taxpayers.... so
| no thanks to this solution.
| recursive wrote:
| Well, they could just be released then...
| vertex-four wrote:
| You the taxpayers are the people who would prefer these
| people stay in prison than release them. You took on the
| responsibility when you put in place a system to imprison
| them. You could always campaign for prison abolition if
| you don't want the responsibility...
| nybble41 wrote:
| > You the taxpayers are the people who would prefer these
| people stay in prison than release them.
|
| 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.
| totalZero wrote:
| All of these people should sue for false imprisonment.
|
| 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.
| km3r wrote:
| And yet, the software may save more than a million
| dollars in admin costs. And as soon as the most of the
| bug are worked out, it can operate less of those payouts.
| Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| I don't understand how people here fail to see that
| completely. Traffic accidents also happen, doesn't mean
| we should abolish vehicles or allow only slow moving
| armored vehicles on the road.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| We all know that it takes more skill (and experience and domain
| knowledge), and more time up-front, to create software that is
| easier/cheaper to change later in response to changed
| requirements.
|
| If you got the cheapest possible software up-front that
| (barely, technically) met the original requirements, you did it
| by hiring the least skilled people that could barely pull off
| exactly what would get the contract paid, and asking them to
| rush and hurry and pile up technical debt.
|
| So.
|
| In this case, the software perhaps shouldn't have even been
| considered fulfilling the contract in the first place, that's
| how crappy it was. The crappier the software, the more
| expensive changes to it are, we all know that.
|
| > One department whistleblower said the number of problems with
| the ACIS system was unprecedented in their professional
| experience. "I have never in my life run across an application
| like this," they said. "It's just been one big cluster."
| aksss wrote:
| I'd not be too quick to dismiss the estimate. If you were asked
| to change a couple nested if statements in a prison's guest
| management system, probably written in Natural, RPG, _and_ Cold
| Fusion or some other obscure combo of tools, you'd be silly not
| to take a step back and be careful with your bidding.
|
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| OK, we've taken the bug out of the title above. It allows the
| whistleblowers to squeeze in, which is nice.
|
| It might be good to have a non-terminological discussion now.
| Though this subthread isn't too bad.
| phamilton4 wrote:
| To be frank, you probably want this solution to be vetted out
| pretty well. I really don't want to think of cases where the
| wrong person was let go. The sizing is what 12 people x 40 for
| 4 weeks? Really not that extreme for large projects.
|
| I also don't understand why they can't identify these people
| and release them by other means...
| hinkley wrote:
| The problem with government contracts is that they are very
| much the class of customer who does not understand software
| requirements. They have all the worst aspects of a small
| company that doesn't understand software and so keeps whip-
| cracking the architecture, and all of the bureaucracy of a
| government with institutionalized PTSD about contract fraud and
| bribery.
|
| If you have a choice between the regional furniture store and
| your state government, I'd have a hard time advising you on
| which one will suck less. It's a tossup. If the owners of the
| furniture store are old enough to have heirs who are late teens
| to 30-something, take the furniture store, because you can ask
| them to intervene.
|
| At some point you have to pay the bills. And destress your
| employees who are constantly having to hurry up and wait.
| brundolf wrote:
| I posted under another comment, but this to me is a software-
| literacy problem. You shouldn't have to hire an engineer to fix
| or adjust business rules in 2021. Period. The people who know
| the domain should be able to maintain (and really, create) any
| automation of that domain themselves.
|
| This is partly a failure of education, partly a failure of
| organizational structuring, and partly a failure of software
| accessibility. But it's a gargantuan failure all the same.
| cynoclast wrote:
| >The people who know the domain should be able to maintain
| (and really, create) any automation of that domain
| themselves.
|
| This is a recipe for disaster 100% of the time. One needs to
| know both the domain and software to change software in the
| domain. People who 'know the domain' but not software, when
| given the tools to modify software within the domain
| inevitably create an unmaintainable rats nest of more
| difficult to change rules, almost invariably in some
| proprietary WYSYWIG tool that creates more problems than it
| solves.
| opportune wrote:
| This is why I think custom software contracting and
| vendorization is a "noob-trap".
|
| Software needs to be updated and maintained and you never know
| when you start writing it what the real requirements are. If I
| were a taxpayer in this state I'd be angry that my money would
| be going to a series of middlemen (e.g. a procurement
| consultant, program manager on the gov side, a contractor
| manager, the contracting company's cut) rather than some state
| employed software developer.
| monadic5 wrote:
| C'mon, that's Big Government. We all know that's the least
| efficient form of production possible.
|
| /s
| mattmcknight wrote:
| Unfortunately the pay scale for state software developers
| never (I almost never say never) has a proper differential
| over other employees with the same level of experience,
| meaning they are often below 10th percentile of market rate,
| and thus the employees that end up in those jobs tend to be
| among the least skilled and motivated people I've ever dealt
| with. Even though contractors mess up, you can fire them.
| What's probably better is to keep a contractor available on
| an hourly rate for maintenance like this, rather than pay per
| change order.
|
| I also find the government "requirements" process tends to
| create situations like this. Rather than build flexible
| software that puts some degree of trust in the person using
| it, they tend to overspecify the current bureaucratic
| process. In many cases, the person pushing for the software
| is looking to use software to enforce bureaucratic control
| that they have been unable to otherwise exercise, with the
| effect of the people the project initiator wants to use the
| software simply working around it. They then institute all
| sorts of punishments and controls to insure it must be used.
| This then results in the kind of insane situation we have
| here, where you can't do something perfectly legal because
| "computer says no".
| tp3 wrote:
| If you're planning on breaking out of a certain contract-
| type or the other will be even more ridiculous, then
| consider putting out a separate RFP or having some special
| setup that allows you to just bypass or do the RFP at a
| higher rate. I'd recommend putting out an RFP for every
| project that needs it, even though it's a small number of
| the projects you're doing, and use that for the next
| project so the future RFPs won't get wasted. Otherwise
| you'll always run into these problems of a small number of
| big companies needing to get approvals because they're the
| one entity.
|
| It gets complicated but there are some simple rules to
| follow. If you are running a non-competitive RFP then that
| might be okay because you are running a competitive RFP and
| so you get these opportunities to leverage your
| competitors, use one of the other competitive RFP rules for
| other projects, to use your competitor's RFP, etc. but you
| need to make sure the RFP you are running only does what
| the competition isn't allowed to do.
| aksss wrote:
| Having worked with a lot of contracted firms that do
| custom software development and platform customization,
| let's not put them too high on a pedestal. What money you
| save on FTE programmers needs to be funneled right back
| into management talent to make sure they deliver a
| quality product (high utility, supportable by next
| contractor, quality docs, etc). Good management talent is
| hard to find and not something any government is known
| for. Consequently, next contractor probably has mondo
| ramp-up time deciphering what hacked pos the last guys
| put in with their c-team developers (cuz margins).
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| > the employees that end up in those jobs tend to be among
| the least skilled and motivated
|
| This. The job itself is terrible and as you mention the pay
| is terrible too. With conditions like that, I'm not
| surprised the product is buggy, over-budget, and difficult
| to improve.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Isn't this what USDS and 18F are for?
| mattmcknight wrote:
| I thought they were pitched as a service opportunity.
| Regardless, it's a small team that only operates at the
| federal level, state and local budgets are much more
| limited.
|
| "Salaries at USDS vary, but don't exceed $170,800,
| determined by your experience and skills." So, they do
| have a relatively low top salary, but it is very
| difficult to do any salary for the government based on
| skills versus age (disguised as years of experience). At
| best you might find adjustments for degrees earned, which
| don't translate well to actual value.
| [deleted]
| lbriner wrote:
| Sorry but this is just a question of balance.
|
| Sure, it sounds like a public-sector employee gives better
| value but if you want to produce commercial quality then you
| still need management, consultancy and high quality HR with
| competitive salaries, otherwise you usually get mediocre
| developers with mediocre results.
|
| Sometimes it really is better to pay a premium on the "day
| rate" to get something more quickly and to a higher standard.
| You also often have access to better support and maintenance.
|
| You pays your money and takes your choice.
| kingaillas wrote:
| >than some state employed software developer.
|
| Are you willing to pay market rates to retain that developer?
| Or deal with the constant churn as people stay long enough to
| pad their resume before moving along to the next job?
| pmontra wrote:
| > the entire inmate management software program, known as ACIS,
| has experienced more than 14,000 bugs since it was implemented in
| November of 2019.
|
| It'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?
| TexasfoldsEm wrote:
| Wow. I know firsthand from family how this can severely destroy
| someone'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'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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| If a prisoner knows he's past his release date, can't he
| contact his lawyer?
| mulmen wrote:
| Depends on if the computer has taken away phone privileges. I
| suppose a good lawyer would already know the release date and
| take action without being contacted? But I have no idea.
| omginternets wrote:
| I'm worried this question might get written off. I would
| actually like to know the answer to this as well.
|
| My immediate reaction is that either (1) it is possible, and
| the story is therefore more nuanced that might appear at
| first glance, or (2) it is not possible, and this is an even
| more egregious problem.
| mulmen wrote:
| The comment that spawned this thread is here and suggests
| phone privileges can also be taken away by mistake in this
| system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26227031
| tmsh wrote:
| Despite this outrage, what makes this country a sustainable
| country is it is a country based on the rule of law.
|
| 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 / early release. Yes it'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).
|
| Perhaps there should be more class-action lawsuits on behalf of
| convicted prisoners in general.
| alex_young wrote:
| Isn't this clearly defined false imprisonment under Arizona law?
|
| Here's the relevant statute:
|
| _13-1303. Unlawful imprisonment; classification; definition
|
| A. A person commits unlawful imprisonment by knowingly
| restraining another person.
|
| B. In any prosecution for unlawful imprisonment, it is a defense
| that:
|
| 1. The restraint was accomplished by a peace officer or detention
| officer acting in good faith in the lawful performance of his
| duty; or
|
| 2. The defendant is a relative of the person restrained and the
| defendant's sole intent is to assume lawful custody of that
| person and the restraint was accomplished without physical
| injury.
|
| 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.
|
| D. For the purposes of this section, "detention officer" 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._
|
| https://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/01303.htm
|
| 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.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Their list is of people eligible for a program that would give
| them an early release, so unless the inmate enrolls the prison
| would be acting in good faith. Almost like the law was
| intentionally worded to limit their liability.
| olingern wrote:
| This is one of those "bugs" that is a feature for the prisons. Of
| course no one wants this fixed.
|
| Also, proof that things that are newer aren't better.
|
| > "We have a couple modules they spent millions of dollars on
| that we can't use at all," a department source said.
|
| > The ACIS software system replaced an older program called AIMS
| that had been in operation for more than three decades.
| grumple wrote:
| I will say that the sum of my misdeeds throughout my life doesn't
| compare to depriving a single person of a single day of their
| freedom. It'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.
|
| But now I've learned that that could, in fact, be a potential
| problem in the future...
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| 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.
| rob74 wrote:
| I'm wondering if there isn't a business model in this: couldn't
| the inmates (or their families) hire some law firm that
| calculates the correct release date and sues the state to get a
| hefty compensation for every day the inmates serve longer than
| they should? That would turn around the incentives...
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| Don't ascribe to malice... The dates and sentences can change
| so many times it's surprisingly hard to calculate. I've watched
| people who try earnestly to get the dates right complain about
| how hard it is.
| gotostatement wrote:
| is there a version of this that says "Dont ascribe to
| incompetence what is more likely caused by greed"? I'm tired
| of seeing comments like this that imply that any accusation
| of greed or malice is unfounded when in todays world,
| particularly in an industry like private prisons, greed is
| often the _most_ likely cause.
| rjurney wrote:
| Reminds me of Russia. There's your release date... and then
| there's your court date. You aren't released until the court date
| after your release date, and without a bribe that could be years.
| You might never get out.
|
| I haven't been there in a while, but this is how it was when I
| lived in Moscow.
| temporallobe wrote:
| 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.
| shobith wrote:
| Peak dystopia is close.
| frompdx wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| There is plenty of useful software. For example: scientific
| software.
| frompdx wrote:
| That's true, and I am not arguing that useful software does
| not exist. Instead, a lot of energy producing software is
| often not useful, or useful in perverse ways.
| danielnixon wrote:
| You might like this
| https://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/...
| austincheney wrote:
| The best solution to the problem is to hold developers
| personally liable for the software they write, as well as the
| owners. That could mean criminal penalties for negligent
| violations of industry standards and processes but will mostly
| result in civil penalties.
|
| The second and third order consequences is that developers will
| insulate themselves behind licensing and proofs of practice
| like every other industry.
|
| Until people actually advocate for real penalties for such
| harmful violations they don't care. All their temporary whining
| and crying is just blowing smoke up our asses.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| > 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.
|
| You are attacking the wrong target. It's the government that's
| broken. This kind of outrage can happen just as easily with
| pencil and paper. The root cause is the lack of accountability
| and desire to make the government function better.
| frompdx wrote:
| Except software allows a scale and efficiency that is
| impossible with pencil and paper while also creating an ideal
| scapegoat. Software is being used to avoid accountability at
| a scale much greater than what was possible with manual
| process.
| Kinrany wrote:
| > Software is being used to avoid accountability
|
| Right, in the same way knives are used to rob people.
|
| This is not a new problem: an organization strategically
| builds an unmanageable bureacracy and then profits off the
| issue while claiming incompetence.
|
| Computers just make said bureaucracy cheaper to operate.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| Isn't this the basis of the book "IBM and the Holocaust"[1]
| where the author lays out how IBM's technology helped
| facilitate the wide scale of Nazi genocide?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
| Kalium wrote:
| The old saw about computers is that they're designed to
| allow humans to make millions of mistakes, very quickly and
| very accurately.
| [deleted]
| Tepix wrote:
| Corporations have similar issues. Just look at the biased
| image recognition technology that FAANG release
| underwater wrote:
| How is this a government problem? People frequently lose
| access to social network accounts and email because of broken
| algorithms. Google can blacklist a business and send it
| broke. Insurance companies, credit bureaus and banks can make
| a wrong decision and deny credit.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| People decide to fix problems in software or anything else
| for that matter. If they don't get fixed it's usually a
| matter of somebody (or bodies) decided it was not a
| priority.
| 1-more wrote:
| But they can be undone with pencil and paper too. The footgun
| of automation here can only be undone with either a really
| good patch (git commit -m 'finally finally works for real
| this time') or a lot of pencil and paper work that's slower
| than the processes that caused the problem.
|
| I'll note that this isn't the first time that people have
| said "well its the algorithm" when they were responsible. The
| example that springs to mind is bail risk assessments. You're
| very correct in that there are people making real decisions
| that are very cruel here. The machines give them something to
| hide behind.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Yes. "It's just the algorithm" is the "it's just procedure"
| of the 21st century.
| majormajor wrote:
| The lack of desire to get things right throughout the
| bureaucracy is the problem. The software is just a mechanism.
| Other organizations that actually care figure out ways to get
| things right even when the software has issues.
|
| You can see in the film Brazil, from 35 years ago, that this
| was already a problem and concern even without modern software.
| dTal wrote:
| Much older than that. The blackly humorous 1965 short story
| "Computers Don't Argue" by Gordon R. Dickson is pretty much
| the definitive "software as a bureaucracy" story. No spoilers
| - it's short and well worth it:
|
| https://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| A big problem is that while we might improve the typical use
| with software, the failure mode is generally ignored and swept
| under the rug. See google's customer service. You can speed up
| and improve the average case a thousand times more, driving
| costs down by maybe a thousand times, or you can bring costs
| down like 2x but keep the benefits of manual, person centric
| failure recovery. Even then, non-automation doesn't make it
| "human" in the sense we all want. A rep in a call center who is
| only allowed to follow the playbook almost might as well be an
| automaton for all the freedom they have. Are faceless economies
| of scale and the bureaucracies they bring the root issue?
| eunos wrote:
| I am not sure how software bug is the exclusive enabler since
| it is plausible as well for administration bug to occur with
| pen and paper along with the compliant warden.
| frompdx wrote:
| It's not that software is the _exclusive_ enabler. It is that
| software is the _ideal_ enabler because of its ability to
| create a truly faceless entity that seems to exist outside
| the power of even those who administer it. Of course these
| issues were always possible without software. Software is
| just so much more efficient and useful for creating these
| kinds of issues because it can scale and because it can be
| the scapegoat.
| lbriner wrote:
| 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 happened
| later (even if it could have been reasonably foreseen) but the
| fact that it was implemented with no override is really the
| scandal.
|
| I don't know whether this comes down to an amount of power that
| exists in a Governor that means the rest of the organisation
| can't say, "sorry Guv, but we can't do this because the
| software wasn't written to". If TV is to be believed, Governors
| want things done yesterday and you worry about the problems.
| frompdx wrote:
| I have a very cynical take. Probably too cynical. The ability
| to shift blame to software as opposed to the humans
| responsible for administering a bureaucracy is exactly what
| makes it so appealing. The question is ignored intentionally.
| marmaduke wrote:
| Not cynical enough: if private prisons with a profit motive
| delay prisoner release, they've made more money.
| blackgirldev wrote:
| That was my first thought actually. We are probably not
| cynical enough! In addition to blame shifting, the prison
| industrial complex is benefitting from having the prisoners
| stay longer, so there is zero incentive to fix the problem.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| 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 be
| codified with a licensure and a stamp like it is in every
| other engineering field in the states.
|
| Software like this ought to require a stamp.
|
| A decent analogy is the environmental work I've done. When we
| come up with solutions and mitigations to environmental
| problems, like software, we can't always predict the result
| because of the complexities involved. So we stamp a design,
| but we, or the agencies responsible for allowing the project
| often specify additional monitoring or other stipulations
| with very specific performance guidelines. It's a flexible
| system and possible to adapt to, but there are real
| consequences and fines when targets aren't met. When bad
| things happen, the specifics of what went wrong and why are
| very relevant and the engineer may be to blame, or the
| owner/site manager, or the contractor who did the work, or
| sometimes no one is to be blamed but the agencies are able to
| say: "Hey this isn't working and needs to be addressed, do it
| by this date or else."
|
| In engineering, there's an enormous amount of public trust
| given to engineered designs. The engineer takes personal
| responsibility for that public trust that a building or
| bridge isn't going to fall down. And if you're negligent,
| it's a BFD.
|
| Given the current level of public trust that we are putting
| into software systems, it's crazy to me that we haven't
| adopted a similar system.
| aksss wrote:
| > additional monitoring or other stipulations
|
| That does happen with software a lot, frequently flying
| under the title of Compensating User Entity Controls
| (CUECs) or User Control Considerations (UCC). Basically the
| "here it is, don't feed it after midnight and don't let it
| get wet, and good luck" riders. Sounds like these problems
| happened way earlier in the lifecycle though - either the
| requirements were missed or the testing was thorough
| enough.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Software is completely different from your typical other
| engineering fields. You just can't apply the same
| methodology there. In other fields such as building bridges
| you are quite often taking what has already been proven to
| work well and building it, while in software if you start
| to repeat yourself you are doing things wrong.
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > 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, though,
| as ultimately taxpayers foot the bill. There also must be some
| degree of accountability for those in charge of the system.
| Software can't become a tool for dodging accountability. Those
| in charge of implementing the software, providing the inputs,
| and managing the outputs must be held accountable for related
| mistakes.
|
| > 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.
|
| Few Ask HN questions get many responses. This is also a loaded
| question, as HN is notorious for nit-picking every response and
| putting too much emphasis on the downsides. For example, I know
| farmers who have increased their farm productivity massively
| using modern hardware and software. However, if I posted that
| it would inevitably draw concerns about replacing human jobs,
| right-to-repair issues, and other issues surrounding the space.
| The world is definitely better off for having more efficient
| and productive farming techniques, freeing most of us up to do
| things other than farm.
|
| However, all new advances bring a different set of problems.
| Instead of trying to force everything into broad categories of
| _better_ or _worse_ I think it 's important to acknowledge that
| technology makes the world _different_. Different is a
| combination of better and worse. The modern world has different
| problems than we did 100 years ago, but given the choice I
| wouldn 't choose to roll back to the pre-computer era.
|
| > It certainly seems that way reading articles like this.
|
| Both news and social media have a strong bias toward articles
| that spark anger or outrage. For me, the whole world stops
| feeling like a dumpster fire when I disconnect from news and
| social media for a while. I'm looking forward to the post-COVID
| era where we can get back to interacting with each other in
| person rather than gathering around a constant stream of
| negative stories on social media.
| frompdx wrote:
| _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.
| pm90 wrote:
| Software is just a tool, it can be used to build good or bad
| things.
|
| It would be hard to see this in e.g. Scandinavian countries,
| where incarceration is seen as rehabilitative rather than
| punitive.
|
| In the US, racial discrimination, free market extremism along
| with "tough on crime" laws have created unimaginably cruel
| systems; together with private prisons, the goal has been on
| cutting costs rather than rehabilitating prisoners. Software is
| just a tool to further that goal.
| P_I_Staker wrote:
| Is rehabilitation not the main goal in the USA? We call the
| places correctional facilities, and do other things that are
| ostensibly there to correct behavior and prevent recidivism.
| In fact, it seems like most of the things that prevent people
| from being successful are unintended side effects.
|
| Here's a thought: Why do we permit private companies to not
| hire ex-cons? Why do you just get to decide that you don't
| want to hold up your civic responsibilities like that? Who
| wants to work with someone that used to be violent maniac,
| sleazy thief, or worse?
|
| I agree about cost cutting measures and the criminal justice
| industrial complex. Still we have bigger issues around crime
| and reconciliation that prevent us from making progress. To
| be honest, I have trouble understanding how we're going to
| change, unless the average person can live with someone
| ruining their life, then spending "only" a year or so in
| prison and moving on to be successful in a decent paying job.
|
| We still find that outrageous in the US, and it's going to be
| very tough to make progress that way. It's not about making
| something "a goal", especially in a country like the US, it's
| about convincing the wealthy and powerful class to do
| anything at all about it and stop making it worse.
| rhino369 wrote:
| We pretend the goal is rehabilitation, but its obviously
| not.
|
| I don't really think any justice system is actually putting
| rehabilitation first. Otherwise, you'd be sentenced to
| "until you get rehabilitated or no more than X years."
| frompdx wrote:
| Indeed, software is an enabling technology and is morally
| ambivalent just like any other tool. A machine tool can make
| a medical device to save lives or military device to destroy
| lives. At the heart of the issue is the intricate web of
| institutional mouse traps designed to convert low stakes
| issues into serious offenses. For example, a person who does
| does respond to a citation for expired vehicle tags is now
| ensured in a mechanism that turns a minor issue related to
| tax collection into a real criminal offense. It is up to
| humans to make these things so.
|
| I brought up the Ask HN question mostly because I felt the
| lack of replies were a silent acknowledgement of the
| realities of most software endeavors. That they are not
| making the world a better place. Most aren't going out of
| their way to make it worse. Probably, it isn't even a
| consideration.
| jerry1979 wrote:
| I don't think tools cancel themselves out, and I suspect that
| nothing "is just" anything.
|
| Even if ideas like "the medium is the message" are partially
| true and then just partially applicable, that should give us
| pause when we try to cross out tools in our morality
| equations.
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
| bitL wrote:
| > if the software we are building is making the world a better
| place
|
| No, it's now all about "extracting value", "rent seeking",
| "subscriptions", "censorship", "monopoly" and "control". We got
| bribed by FAANG and this is the consequence.
| rectang wrote:
| > _making the world a better place_
|
| For a large segment of the US electorate, anything that
| inflicts pain on "bad people" _is_ "making the world a better
| place".
|
| If the software was causing prisoners to be released _early_ ,
| most US voters would be up in arms. But if they're being held
| too long, the calculus is different. In software terms, for
| many Americans, a "tough on crime" outcome is a "feature not a
| bug".
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I think the most likely explanation is just that people didn't
| see the question or weren't interested in having the
| discussion. Most people believe the work they're doing is at
| worst neutral. A less likely candidate for the reason (but
| still more likely than your guess) is that people didn't want
| to be subjected to unfounded criticism of their work from
| people who don't know anything about it.
| bondolo wrote:
| 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
| malandrew wrote:
| > 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 the code and submit bug reports,
| including inmates. If they know there is something wrong, they
| have a lot of time on their hands to learn a useful skill to
| fix these issues.
|
| The government should then not be allowed to close a bug as
| wontfix or invalid without approval from other citizen
| watchdogs verifying if a bug report is legitimate.
| frompdx wrote:
| 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 problem but are leaving it up to individual inmates and
| their advocates, both inside and outside the system, to sort
| it out.
| malandrew wrote:
| > 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
| alephnil wrote:
| Yes, software can be used as a cover for abuse like in this
| case, but that happens because some people in power let it
| happen. For other pieces of software that have consequences for
| people with more power than prisoners, the society will not
| allow failures to happen. I only need to mention the MCAS
| software of Boeing 737 Max for a counterexample.
|
| Software does not have its own will. Software is only allowed
| to make decisions on our behalf because we let it do so.
| frompdx wrote:
| It is interesting that you bring up the 737 Max. I was
| actually talking the 737 Max in the context of software being
| both infallible and the perfect scapegoat with someone last
| week. The 737 Max is an example of how software was believed
| to be infallible (it wasn't) and was ultimately the scapegoat
| for a design flaw. That doesn't mean the 737 Max was
| something that happened intentionally. However, when the time
| came to assign blame fingers began pointing at the software.
|
| I do agree that software has no will. It is a tool for
| facilitating our will for better or worse.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| I dropped this in a comment elsewhere in this discussion, but
| also makes sense here...
|
| I find the government "requirements" process tends to create
| situations like this. Rather than build flexible software that
| puts some degree of trust in the person using it, they tend to
| overspecify the current bureaucratic process. In many cases,
| the person pushing for the software is looking to use software
| to enforce bureaucratic control that they have been unable to
| otherwise exercise, with the effect of the people the project
| initiator wants to use the software simply working around it.
| They then institute all sorts of punishments and controls to
| insure it must be used. This then results in the kind of insane
| situation we have here, where you can't do something perfectly
| legal because "computer says no".
| indymike wrote:
| In this case, the requirements should be as simple as
| implement the law.
| carlmr wrote:
| Implementing the law, especially in a common law country
| like the US is really difficult. The case law that is of
| primary importance here is often contradictory and fuzzy,
| as well as changing constantly. In addition the written law
| doesn't capture the whole situation.
|
| In a civil law system it's more likely achievable, but I'm
| quite sure the requirements aren't that clear cut judging
| from the text.
| aksss wrote:
| Well, there's the law (federal, state, etc), then the
| additional regulatory rulings (federal, state, etc), then
| the as-applied department policies. Not really a lack of
| "law" but a _mess_ of constraints that need to be
| deciphered into functional requirements with footnotes,
| matrixed to testing and preserved /maintained for the
| next guy. Ugh.. I want to charge the gov. 2k hrs for just
| thinking about it today.
| throwaway8581 wrote:
| Civil law codes are often just as ambiguous as common law
| systems. The only difference is that in a civil law
| system, you can't firmly rely on precedent, so a judge
| can interpret the law against you just because he doesn't
| like you, even in the face of contrary precedent.
|
| That's in part why international business to business
| contracts almost always specify a common law jurisdiction
| as the required venue for any lawsuits.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| That's as insightful as people saying " just follow the
| constitution" when in reality people have been fighting
| about the exact meaning for centuries. Most laws leave some
| room for interpretation. This is pretty much necessary
| because the law can't specify each corner case.
|
| Same goes for software requirements. Good requirements make
| the intent clear but allow implementers some flexibility.
| Specifying everything in minute detail is usually a recipe
| for disaster.
| pmontra wrote:
| 16 months is a long time, especially when people are in
| jail and they should not be there. However in my experience
| as software developer nothing is simple, but everything can
| be done.
|
| First problem coming to my mind: do they have the budget to
| pay the software developers to add this new functionality
| to the software? Do they have to ask the money to someone
| else, maybe to the very politicians that changed the
| requirement?
|
| Then when this is settled there are the usual problems of
| analysis and implementation. Probably also where to get
| that input that they didn't have before. It could be a
| large project. But 16 months, ouch.
| vntok wrote:
| Implementing "the law" is anything and everything but
| simple.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| "Implement the law" in a software product is as utopian as
| replacing judges with computers that "implement the law".
| Now does it makes sense why it is not possible?
| indymike wrote:
| Perhaps software isn't the right place to implement the
| law?
| frompdx wrote:
| _the person pushing for the software is looking to use
| software to enforce bureaucratic control that they have been
| unable to otherwise exercise_
|
| This is frequently my observation as well. In the process of
| creating stricter control the bureaucrat increases the the
| power of their bureaucracy while shifting the blame for any
| problems to a faceless entity.
|
| _They then institute all sorts of punishments and controls
| to insure it must be used._
|
| This leads me to one of my primary frustrations with the
| bureaucratization of our lives. Severe consequences are
| attached to low stakes situations and rational individuals
| who see the harm caused by the situation are rendered
| powerless to make changes.
| panic wrote:
| _> Severe consequences are attached to low stakes
| situations and rational individuals who see the harm caused
| by the situation are rendered powerless to make changes._
|
| You can see the process at work within this very thread --
| _" And within that chain, there should be legal recourse
| and, in most cases, penal consequences, especially in the
| case of inadequate software quality/testing/validation,
| should the software fail to perform its task correctly."_
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26228195)
|
| People seem unable to imagine any way to improve things
| except by adding more and more legal consequences. We need
| to stop doing this!
| frompdx wrote:
| This is an excellent observation about the process of
| bureaucratization in action. For some reason the solution
| to the failings of bureaucracy ends up being even more
| bureaucracy and even greater consequences for failing to
| play by the rules of the bureaucracy.
|
| Is bureaucracy like violence? If it isn't working you
| aren't using enough of it?
| panic wrote:
| Yeah, it's tempting to imagine that all the problems in
| the world can be solved in the same kind of way, whether
| through more bureaucracy or more violence. Another
| example is the libertarian idea that all problems can be
| solved through the application of market forces. Maybe
| the general term for this is solutionism -- the idea that
| problems have "solutions" which take certain standard
| forms, when really these problems are the natural result
| of various patterns of human activity which may or may
| not respond to the "solution" you chose. In the worst
| case, you can end up in a sort of feedback loop, where an
| earlier "solution" was actually the cause of the problem
| that justifies the next "solution" and so on.
| frompdx wrote:
| Solutionism seems like an apt term. In addition,
| solutionists may feel bound to their ideology and unable
| to see problems caused by their solutions for what they
| are leading the types of feedback loops you describe.
| People double down on their beliefs when presented with
| opposing viewpoints or even contrary evidence all of the
| time. Interesting observation.
| malandrew wrote:
| > In the process of creating stricter control the
| bureaucrat increases the the power of their bureaucracy
| while shifting the blame for any problems to a faceless
| entity.
|
| They are basically using software to preserve the problem
| to which they are the solution. i.e. the shirky principle
|
| https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| 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.
| dustingetz wrote:
| software is a tool used by people. You are measuring America.
| davidkhess wrote:
| What if the root cause is the ever increasing complexity that
| software is trying to manage? At all levels (legislature,
| management, bureaucrats, programming languages, developers,
| testers, users, subjects) we are creating more and more complex
| situations we ask software and the institutions that produce it
| to manage for us.
|
| But as the complexity goes up and the number of these complex
| situations increases, are we reaching a point where we outstrip
| the amount of money, talent and experience our institutions
| would need to deliver solutions to successfully manage them?
|
| With our resources and intelligence as a species being capped,
| it seems at some point this is inevitable.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| 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/validation,
| should the software fail to perform its task correctly. Bonus
| side effect, software quality will go up across the board in
| the industry.
| raymondh wrote:
| > And within that chain, there should be legal > recourse
| and, in most cases, penal consequences,
|
| Wikipedia says, "Under common law, false imprisonment is both
| a crime and a tort".
| throwaway8581 wrote:
| It's not the software makers who are committing the crimes.
| It's the people abdicating responsibility to software. You
| can't wipe your hands of releasing a prisoner on schedule by
| delegation that to software. The software can help you with
| your task, but if it's brought to your attention that there's
| a mistake, your failure to promptly fix it is on you.
| Tepix wrote:
| It's both. Look at the amount of unnecessary waste created
| by the abysmal Android update policy.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| > Our cowardly politicians and toothless regulatory agencies
| are not up for the challenge.
|
| Because their constituents want people to be punished and if
| the inmates have to suffer a little extra so be it, "they
| shouldn't have committed a crime."
|
| Our society is severely lacking in empathy.
| P_I_Staker wrote:
| Or things don't get much better, and management finds a way
| to make it someone else's problem. Do you think it's the CEO
| or the people making these decisions that will be locked up?
| We'll just be arresting whatever yes men show up to be the
| pawn in the stupid game someone else architected.
|
| More people working with a gun to their head. I'd rather the
| gun be pointed at the person who already has a gun pointed at
| me, instead of both barrels facing in my direction.
| daanlo wrote:
| Imho that wouldn't cause quality to go up. It would just make
| it more expensive to develop and to fix bugs. Even more cover
| your ass would go on.
|
| Or at least a huge share of that burden needs to be on the
| client so that they define and then test and control the SW
| they receive properly.
|
| The problems with the software sound like typical big
| software project problems. Trying to cover a huge breadth of
| use cases with lots of very important tiny details and
| released in a big bang (one migration). It sounds like more
| of a project mgmt problem than a software problem to me.
|
| But maybe I am just a hammer and see nails everywhere.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| The politicians and toothlessness of the regulatory agencies
| is a direct result of the electorate. The electorate likes
| these sorts of outcomes, and any politician that goes against
| them will find themselves either primaried or drummed out of
| office.
| pc86 wrote:
| At what point do you feel the developers - the ones who
| actually wrote the code - should be held legally responsible
| for that code's execution?
| [deleted]
| platinumrad wrote:
| This headlining issue is a specification change and it is
| an administrative rather than an engineering failure to
| knowingly rely on outdated software. The article also
| refers to other software problems but in scenarios like
| this the people who write the code (as well as the people
| who operate it, such as corrections department IT staff)
| tend to have no decision making power whatsoever:
|
| >"It was Thanksgiving weekend," one source recalled. "We
| were killing ourselves working on it, but every person
| associated with the software rollout begged (Deputy
| Director) Profiri not to go live."
| bendbro wrote:
| Nobody will take that contract. Any mistake in the government
| specifying what they want you to build can be politically
| manipulated into a legal matter with some probability you'll
| end up in prison.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Not at all: any mistake in the government specifications is
| the government's problem. If you have requirements and a
| requirement tracing matrix to deliverables and you deliver
| what is required, you are good.
|
| But usually in most parts of the world these government
| contracts are intentionally made ambiguous for so many
| reasons including corruption and incompetence of the people
| writing requirements.
| carlmr wrote:
| Maybe every contract like this should be programmed to the
| same API twice. Then you could at least compare it the two
| pieces of software agree. You check the disagrees and get the
| companies to fix them (should be part of the contract).
|
| And don't tell me you can't buy two CRUD applications for 24
| million dollars. It's a silly amount of money for such a
| buggy application.
| rjurney wrote:
| 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.
| foerbert wrote:
| 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.
| aksss wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The old COBOL crap is more likely to have been
| implemented by someone with a clue.
|
| The "new" systems are usually aping the old system
| behavior. In one case, I ran into a system where some
| company converted COBOL transactions into Java with some
| sort of automated tool to put the legacy system "on the
| internet".
| RHSeeger wrote:
| It will never be the case that software will be perfect. We
| can get closer and closer, but the closer we are the more
| expensive the next step in closing the gap is.
|
| While I do agree that making software better/more reliable is
| a good goal, I believe we would be better off making the
| system as a whole more robust; the system that includes
| humans. For every situation where a piece of software has
| control of something that effects society (individual, group,
| etc), there should always be a clear and direct means of
| appealing / pushing back on the decision that was made. Those
| means should involve a human reviewing the information and
| making a decision based on that information, not on what the
| computer said. There's thread after thread of us saying the
| exact same thing about companies like Google and Facebook; it
| should apply as a general rule.
| extropy wrote:
| There is no such thing as perfect software when
| requirements change with time. We need adaptable software
| instead.
|
| Like all our governance mechanisms have a built-in system
| of constant change.
| josephg wrote:
| I agree with other commenters. And I think another part of
| the problem is the consumer model of software. In a pen and
| paper system if there was some reason why a record was
| special or different from the others, you could just attach
| a note to it and the next person who picked up the record
| could read your note. Custom software systems deny that
| sort of ad-hoc flexibility from the people using them.
| There's no way to do anything that wasn't planned for and
| programmed in. So office workers who use flows managed by
| custom software are actively disempowered from authorship
| over their own workflows.
|
| That's one of the reasons I think Excel (and tools like
| Notion) are so popular - the people on the ground can learn
| to express themselves in the full context of the tools. I
| think this sort of software is far more important than we
| give it credit for. (It's an invisible problem to us,
| because we can change the software.)
| rowanG077 wrote:
| No one is arguing that software must be perfect. But we
| aren't really even trying. Most software is written in
| extremely error prone languages without adequate testing.
|
| You don't hear anyone saying we should throw out finite-
| element analyses and other computational verification
| methods when designing bridges because bridges can never be
| perfectly secure. Yet that is exactly the sentiment I often
| hear on software.
| Aerroon wrote:
| Are bridges and software comparable in complexity though?
| How many engineers work on designing a bridge compared to
| software developers that are writing a program? There are
| more than an order of magnitude more software developers
| in the US than civil engineers.
|
| Now think about the state of US infrastructure. Does it
| inspire confidence for the future?
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I'd say a lot of software is comparable in complexity to
| the large bridges that exist. Of course there are massive
| software projects that dwarf any bridge ever build. But a
| lot of software is only moderately complex.
|
| I don't know about infrastructure in the US. I don't live
| there. I'm happy with the infrastructure in west Europe
| though. I wish that much care was put in to the software
| I use every day.
| frompdx wrote:
| 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.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| This is part of it. Otherwise it's just way cheaper to run
| a faceless bureaucracy that sometimes throws people under
| the bus when a mistake has been made.
| rbanffy wrote:
| It's a cost/benefit analysis. They'll be taken to court by
| a few inmates, have to pay them or settle out of court and
| bill the government for their stays. Since everything is a
| matter of money, what the company will do is what brings
| them the most profit after they paid their legal bills.
|
| It seems keeping inmates longer pays better than releasing
| them on time.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > _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._
|
| No, you know how to blame people and punish people, but that
| doesn't mean you know how to deliver custom bespoke software
| for a price that the various government agencies can afford
| which doesn't have bugs that severely hurt peoples lives.
|
| In fact, punishing people is not going to accomplish that.
|
| That's the problem with a legislature that thinks it can pass
| any law it wants - let's take into account this new variable
| X that our software has no way of collecting or measuring -
| without looking at the feasibility of actually implementing
| the law given the infrastructure available, and without
| approving a corresponding budget for software upgrades to
| actually enact the law, and taking into account how much time
| it would take to write, test, deploy, and then train people
| to use the new software instead of just issuing streams of
| mandates like Emperor Norton and expecting the mandates to
| materialize into existence like the morning dew. And if said
| morning dew does not appear, then we can punish and sue the
| people in charge when they tell us there is no way they can
| do what we are asking them.
|
| Of course there is blame on the prison leadership for
| covering things up and that leadership should be fired, but
| you can punish and sue people all day long and it's not going
| to result in any good code being written. Punish enough
| people, and it will just result in the Law being repealed.
|
| The problem with this type of bespoke code is that it has
| exactly 1 customer, so it's going to be horrendously
| expensive while also being buggy and quickly thrown together
| compared to software whose development costs are leveraged
| over millions of customers. And then what happens next year
| when some crusader decides that they need to take some other
| new variable into account? Constantly changing requirements,
| underspecified projects, one-off projects whose schedules are
| impossible to estimate, and cash strapped local governments.
| Yeah, that's a recipe for success.
|
| This is why everyone hates enterprise software, but even
| enterprise software has tens of thousands of customers.
| Bespoke software for the Arizona prison system -- forget it.
| kingaillas wrote:
| 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.
| Draiken wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >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 the modern world that
| we take for granted.
|
| A balance needs to be struck. And it generally needs to
| be struck further toward the "quickly and cheaply build
| it like crap but make it easy to override or reset"
| portion of the available solution space than anyone
| pontificating about quality on the internet will readily
| admit.
| handoflixue wrote:
| We don't say "perfection is impossible" when it comes to
| bridges collapsing. We understand that yes, on rare
| occasion a bridge WILL collapse, but we go and find the
| people responsible, and we still hold them accountable.
|
| This is a level of accountability that basically every
| other field of engineering is held to, and they've all
| risen to the challenge and left the "off-brand duct tape"
| behind.
|
| Even within programming, planes don't fall out of the sky
| daily, so I feel safe assume the aerospace programmers
| are comfortable working with a high degree of
| responsibility. High speed traders are dealing with
| million-dollar stakes and a single mistake can make the
| news. I'd expect they've got a very accountable culture
| where people get fired when that happens.
|
| There are costs, yes, but there's also costs to keep 733
| people illegally imprisoned - we're talking two man-years
| of peoples lives lost every DAY this goes on.
| Aerroon wrote:
| Why not hold the people accountable that deployed the
| tool? Ultimately the tool _helps_ a human do the job. It
| doesn 't do anything on its own. If a contractor shows up
| to do repairs in your house, but their hammer is faulty
| and the head flies through your window you don't talk to
| the hammer manufacturer. You talk to the contractor. It's
| the contractor's job to deal with wherever they got the
| hammer from.
|
| If software developers are held responsible for the
| software then expect costs to multiply. Nobody would
| directly sell you software either - they'd sell you a
| hardware and software bundle that you must use _exactly_
| as the developers say. If you input a value that 's out
| of bounds then that's on you. The software also won't get
| updates and it will run on 20 year old hardware. That's
| not too dissimilar to what we have in aerospace, right?
| And developers aren't even held responsible there! It's
| the companies, so expect it to be worse than even that.
| underwater wrote:
| Would you blame the people who paid for the bridge for
| the collapse? Should they have understood the details and
| flagged where corners were cut.
|
| When it comes to critical system I think it's fair to say
| that the engineers who build it are the only ones who can
| fully understand the risk.
|
| This is the point behind accreditation. It forces the
| supplier to maintain a minimum bar for services to
| protect the reputation of the industry.
| vinger wrote:
| In real life the engineers don't police themselves.
|
| Before a bridge, house or even patio deck with a
| foundation is used a safety inspector needs to give
| approval.
| aksss wrote:
| > the world runs on off-brand duct tape
|
| So very, very true.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| It is already costing as it should have that level of
| quality - a 24 million dollar system should be hard to
| justify that cost.
|
| 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.
| malka wrote:
| Good, this is precisely the objective.
| ryanong wrote:
| that doesn't sound bad to me if we are dealing with
| people's life or people's freedoms
| varenc wrote:
| If there's penal consequences for bad software, you can bet
| that the development cost will easily 10x overnight.
| oftenwrong wrote:
| Is there a better option? This is software that has to 100%
| work in order to be trusted. If the software cannot be
| trusted, additional process has to fill in to verify the
| decisions the software is making. There's no way to deliver
| a good solution cheaply.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| All software has bugs. This is the mantra we are taught
| and for a good reason.
|
| The answer is human oversight.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I wouldn't work on such software.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| You would for 10x the salary.
| [deleted]
| rectang wrote:
| > _cowardly politicians_
|
| They aren't cowardly; they are responding rationally to a
| constituency that hates "criminals". Prioritizing fixing
| discriminatory systems (such as this software, or "stop and
| frisk", or the death penalty) is bad electoral politics for
| "tough on crime" politicians.
| whack wrote:
| 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.
| derefr wrote:
| The "right" bureaucratic system isn't one with humans doing
| calculations (which we're bad at); nor is it one where
| computers on their own make decisions (which _they 're_
| bad/inflexible at.)
|
| Instead, it's one where computers do calculations but _don
| 't_ make decisions; and then humans _look_ at those
| calculations and have a final say (and responsibility!) over
| inputting a _decision_ into the computer in response to the
| _calculations_ the computer did, _plus_ any other qualitative
| raw data factors that are human-legible but machine-illegible
| (e.g. the "special requests" field on your pizza order.)
|
| Governments already _know_ how to design human-computer
| systems this way; that knowledge is just not evenly
| distributed. This is, for example, how military drone
| software works: the robot computes a target lock and says "I
| can shoot that if you tell me to"; the human operator makes
| the decision of whether to _grant authorization_ to shoot;
| the robot, with authorization, then computes _when_ is best
| to shoot, and shoots at the optimal time (unless
| authorization is revoked before that happens.) A human
| operator somewhere nevertheless bears final responsibility
| for each shot fired. The human is in _command_ of the
| software, just as they would be in command of a platoon of
| infantrymen.
|
| You know policy/mechanism separation? For bureaucratic
| processes, _mechanism_ is generally fine to automate 100%.
| But, at the point where _policy_ is computed, you can gain a
| lot by ensuring that the computed policy goes through a final
| predicate-function workflow-step defined as "show a human my
| work and my proposed decision, and then return _their_
| decision. "
| kodah wrote:
| > and responsibility!
|
| You won't get this though. If the machines are the only
| ones capable of making the calculations with less error
| then a human can only validate higher level criteria.
| Things like "responsibility" and "accountability" become
| very vague words in these scenarios, so be specific.
|
| A human should be able to trace calculations software makes
| through auditing. The software will need to be good at
| indicating what needs auditing and what doesn't for the
| sake of time and effort. You'll probably also need a way
| for inmates to start an auditing process.
| oconnor663 wrote:
| I think "human in loop" designs are a good idea at a high
| level, but a big practical problem you run into when you
| try to build them is that the humans tend to become
| dependent on the computers. For example, you could say this
| is what happened when the self-driving Uber test vehicle
| killed a pedestrian in 2018. Complacency and (if it's a
| full-time job) boredom become major challenges in these
| designs.
| xapata wrote:
| > humans look at those calculations and have a final say
| (and responsibility!) over inputting a decision into the
| computer in response to the calculations the computer did,
| plus any other qualitative raw data factors that are human-
| legible but machine-illegible (e.g. the "special requests"
| field on your pizza order.)
|
| Or, have the computer make decisions when there aren't any
| "special requests" fields to look at, and have outlier
| configurations routed to humans. Humans shouldn't need to
| make every decision in a high-volume system. Computers
| think in binary, but your design doesn't have to.
| brundolf wrote:
| The way I see it, one aspect of this is software literacy.
| The bureaucrats would only be doing the task by hand instead
| of fixing the bug (or even cobbling together a more basic
| automation! Excel could probably get them most of the way
| there) if they are a) unable to do it themselves, and b)
| can't/don't want to pay an expert to do it.
|
| We can no longer afford to partition the people who
| understand/use business logic from the people who turn it
| into code and maintain that code. Period. It's ridiculous and
| endemic at this point. This problem permeates virtually every
| large organization in existence; public or private.
|
| It's partly an issue of education, partly an issue of
| organizational structuring, and partly an issue of
| accessibility of technologies. But the sum of these parts has
| become entirely unacceptable in the year 2021.
| EsotericAlgo wrote:
| While not universally true, a manual process does typically
| require a process to fix mistakes. This is true of software
| as well but the perceived lack of errors in software
| processes often leads to this being ignore resulting in the
| aforementioned "bureaucratic violence". I do think automated
| solutions are inherently better because of the bias reasons
| you call out but it cuts both ways and removes interpretation
| from processes that may not respect nuance.
| caconym_ wrote:
| > The reality is that manual entry is even more error-prone,
| bias-prone, with more people falling through the cracks.
|
| It doesn't have to be. But when it's subjected to the same
| incentives that produced this software and perpetuated its
| broken state, we should expect the result to be much the
| same.
|
| When you pull back and try to look at it with fresh eyes, our
| prison system is abjectly terrifying. It's designed to funnel
| wealth to private entities, not to implement justice or
| rehabilitate criminals or whatever other worthy goal(s) you
| might imagine for it. This story (as horrifying as it is just
| by itself) is only one little corner of the monolithic
| perversity of the system as a whole, and the executive powers
| involved in steering that system are about as close to _evil_
| as you can find in the real world.
|
| The whole thing needs to be torn down and rebuilt. As long as
| it exists, it puts the lie to our claim of being a society
| that values freedom and justice.
|
| Circling back, I guess the point is that the ideas about how
| to do software in your last paragraph have no chance of being
| implemented in the system as it currently exists. To fix
| "systemic problems", we will have to aim a lot higher with a
| much bigger gun.
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| One of the issues is that laws are made on paper and then
| everyone needs to figure out how to map it to software.
| Instead, laws should be codified in software and legal APIs
| should be binding. This would do wonders for efficiency, but
| also force laws to be cleaned up, be consistent, simple and
| logical.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| I don't even know what this would entail. Reality is
| continuous and subjective; computers are not. And there's
| no reason that "legal APIs" would be any more cleaned up,
| consistent, simple or logical than our current legal
| system.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| So the government writes up a spec for how the legalese
| should map to code that engineers then implement? How is
| that different from what happens now?
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| Only the programmed end result in code would be legally
| binding. Lawmakers would have a big interst in making
| sure the code is correct and provide incentives/change
| procedures accordingly.
|
| The inmates in this article would be released immediately
| after the code-law is implemented; you could apply new
| tax laws (i.e. as a config file) to your accounting
| software.
|
| Why maintain an obfuscated legal text when you need it in
| software anyway?
| Clubber wrote:
| I don't think it's so much that software is better or worse
| than manual entry. First, it's the attitude / rules that
| assume what's in the system is right. Second, it's no real
| procedure to audit or check the accuracy of the data.
|
| From a professional who works with data systems, you're more
| likely to have a database with bad data in it that not.
| munk-a wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I think that the pre-software world was quite bias-prone and
| extremely expensive for large processing jobs like this. The
| question is how this system was allowed to transition from
| the expensive manually managed system that used to be in
| place to the automatic software driven system that is
| replacing it at such a cut-rate that gigantic bugs were
| allowed to sneak in.
|
| It appears this software is primarily used by the state
| government so why was such a poor replacement allowed as a
| substitute for the working manual process.
|
| Also, the number of bugs this software has accumulated since
| Nov 2019 (14000) is astounding enough that I assume it's
| counting incidents - that's a fair way to go since these are
| folks' lives, but I'd be curious to know just how bug laden
| this software actually is.
|
| _Although_ there is another factor here - this specific
| release program was a rather late feature addition that may
| not have been covered in the original contract with ACIS
| since the bill was only signed into law two months before the
| software was rolled out.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Probably like most government purchases, lowest bidder wins
| as long as they show on paper that they can do the job.
| Whether they execute on that is another matter, and some
| times the subpar work is accepted because of contract
| issues, sunk cost fallacy, politics/reputations, or
| schedule.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The problem is that we never evolved COBOL / VB.
|
| Or we did, but then used the resulting easier-to-learn /
| easier-to-write languages exclusively for web dev, and
| further specialized them.
|
| There's a mind-bogglingly _huge_ chasm of simple business
| data processing software that has no performance
| requirements & no need to be written in an impenetrable
| language.
|
| Any one of the employees there could probably tell you what
| _should_ be done in each case, and it 's an indictment of
| our profession that we haven't created a good language /
| system that lets them do so.
|
| You can optimize along increase-developer-productivity or
| along increase-potential-developer-population. We chose the
| former.
| dmead wrote:
| most of us have jobs that service the revenue streams of rich
| owners. what did you think was going to happen?
| ehnto wrote:
| It's such a hard question to answer, because software doesn't
| exist in a vacuum. Hopefully this example is relevant:
|
| You're a software developer maintaining an eCommerce platform,
| on the one hand your platform helps perpetuate low margin and
| wasteful consumerism, on the other hand your software enables
| small businesses to compete in the new online world.
|
| Consumerism is bad, but commerce is as old as civilization and
| supports all of our lifestyles, so on a macro level you're in a
| tough spot. You're a talented developer putting their skills to
| work building something the community needs, I personally think
| that means you're doing good work in the context of your
| society, but it is difficult to say if it's making the world a
| better place.
|
| Social media is the same. On the one hand, it connects family
| and friends, on the other it drives narcissisms, consumerism
| and misinformation.
|
| You almost have to try and calculate the "Net Good" or "Net
| Bad" of a type of software and see how the cards fall. For
| social media I would suggest that it's currently in a "Net Bad"
| situation, causing more harm than good for example.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| What are the ethical obligations of software developers working
| on this project?
| platinumrad wrote:
| They almost certainly have zero decision making power so
| whistleblowing and then quitting is the obvious course of
| action.
|
| >"It was Thanksgiving weekend," one source recalled. "We were
| killing ourselves working on it, but every person associated
| with the software rollout begged (Deputy Director) Profiri not
| to go live."
|
| >But multiple sources involved in the rollout said they were
| instructed by department leadership to "not say a word" about
| their concerns. "We were told 'We're too deep into it -- too
| much money had been spent -- we can't go back now.'"
| wombatpm wrote:
| Back in the late 90's a bunch got released early due to Y2K. So
| it balances out
| atty wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| hkh28 wrote:
| As an outside observer (European) this seems to be the way the
| American prison system is run. The inmates are not viewed as
| humans by the people responsible, enabling horrible conditions.
|
| Fixing such an issue should be top priority, and in the
| meantime, you would revert to pen and paper accounting to
| ensure the correct release of each prisoner.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| You're overlooking something else. America has an
| unbelievable number of prisoners, which makes more careful
| and humane management effectively impossible. Estimates are
| that we've got about 2% of the US population in prison or
| somewhere else in the correctional system (pre-trial
| detention, probation, parole, etc.), the labor required to
| treat these people like humans isn't available. And arguably
| by the point where you're locking that many people up, as a
| society that might be the point.
|
| As an aside, it does really rankle me that a country that
| won't shut up about being "the land of the free" is arguably
| a prison state.
| cwkoss wrote:
| The US has a specific exemption to the prohibition of
| slavery for incarcerated individuals in our constitution. I
| think there are many powerful people in our country with a
| vested interest in keeping the prison-slave-labor pipeline
| flowing.
| danaliv wrote:
| _Grandmaster:_ Revolution? How did this happen?
|
| _Topaz:_ Don 't know. But the Arena's mainframe for the
| Obedience Disks have been deactivated and the slaves have
| armed themselves.
|
| _Grandmaster:_ Ohhh! I don 't like that word!
|
| _Topaz:_ Mainframe?
|
| _Grandmaster:_ No. Why would I not like "mainframe?"
| No, the "S" word!
|
| _Topaz:_ Sorry, the "prisoners with jobs" have armed
| themselves.
|
| _Grandmaster:_ Okay, that 's better.
| edbob wrote:
| The exemption allows an individual to be sentenced to
| slavery , but that can only happen if the federal or
| state laws also allow that sentence. Is there any
| jurisdiction whose laws allow a sentence of slavery? Has
| anyone actually been sentenced to slavery in the last 100
| years or so? I would imagine that if some jurisdiction
| somehow did sentence someone to slavery, the states would
| quickly amend the constitution to make that impossible,
| while the courts would doubtless find some other grounds
| for ruling that sentence unconstitutional. It just seems
| unnecessary to make a currently impossible sentence a
| little more impossible.
|
| I was sentenced to hard labor, but that is quite a
| distinct sentence. I was a ward of the state, but not
| property.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| It's wise in these situations to consider the concept of
| plausible deniability, and how it can be used to obscure
| intent.
|
| To my knowledge, nobody has been sentenced to slavery in
| a long, long time. On the other hand, the US has managed
| to lock up 2% of its population and force them to labor
| in circumstances and rates that would be illegal for free
| citizens in order to guarantee the profit of private
| corporations. That this system of arbitrary law
| enforcement[0] disproportionately hits the same sub-group
| that used to be literally enslaved really should send
| your eyebrows through the ceiling when the defense is
| that it's not literally slavery.
|
| Of course, US prisoners are not chattel slaves; they're
| not literally property, and neither are their children.
| On the other hand the rate of recidivism in the US, and
| the strong correlation of outcomes between parent to
| child makes this kind of a cruel joke. If your father
| having been in prison makes you overwhelmingly likely to
| end up in prison yourself for similar reasons, it's hard
| to put on a straight face and pretend that nothing is
| wrong.
|
| I'd argue that this structure represents something akin
| to stochastic terrorism, but for forced labor. Stochastic
| terrorism is a case where someone or some group attempts
| to radicalize and encourage terrorism from afar. Done
| correctly it produces a statistical probability of terror
| attacks without anyone (even the group) being able to
| predict the exact time and place. These types of systems
| are _very_ hard to disrupt, which is why groups like ISIS
| leaned on them in order to attack the west, which had
| gotten very good at stopping more organized attacks.
|
| Similarly, I'd argue that the US system represents a type
| of stochastic slavery. It's impossible to precisely
| predict who will or will not end up in the system
| providing free labor (unlike chattel slavery, where it's
| very easy to predict), but one can easily calculate the
| aggregate chance of someone ending up in prison. It's not
| literally slavery, but with the recidivism rate so high
| it ends up functioning like it for most people caught up
| in it. Oh, and it's run for a profit too, which is deeply
| concerning.
|
| 0 - Drug laws remain key to why America has so many
| people locked up, and drug law enforcement is incredibly
| arbitrary, both in terms of which drugs get which
| sentences, and who gets the hammer dropped on them when
| they get caught.
| edbob wrote:
| For the record, I fully support decriminalizing drugs,
| even if I disagree with the currently fashionable
| rhetoric about their supposed harmlessness. The
| statistical debate you want to have is fine. It could
| potentially be helpful, but not if you insist on terms
| that tell people that they are helpless. Please just
| stick to accurate terms that don't convince people to not
| even try.
|
| We have an existing term, "prison labor", which
| accurately describes the conditions and evokes the
| appropriate moral connotations. When we have completely
| adequate terms already, why insist on a legally
| inaccurate word which requires such a lengthy
| redefinition?
|
| Slavery is an involuntary condition which cannot be
| exited through one's actions. It's vital to recognize
| that criminals can choose to exit the criminal class.
| It's not vital for rich people in the suburbs who don't
| have to live in our world. It's vital for us, ourselves.
| Those of us who accept responsibility for their actions
| tend to be the ones who make it in society. The ones who
| blame society, government, Republicans, white men, SJWs,
| or _anything_ else outside of themselves which they have
| no control over, keep doing the same things over and
| over, stay addicted to drugs, sex, and violence, and keep
| coming to prison over and over. (There are some skinheads
| that blame racial preferences for their own failures in
| life, lest anyone think that I 'm naming SJWs
| facetiously). Rich people can afford to have these
| intellectual debates that talk about helping the poor but
| never seem to actually do anything. _We_ have to actually
| live in this world, where our own choices and actions
| will be the only ones we can always count on.
|
| Stop telling people that they have no control over their
| lives. If they believe you, it will be true. These ivory
| tower theories have real-world consequences. They never
| seem to get around to actually helping the poor, but they
| do convince people that they can't help themselves, and
| those are the people that I see coming back to prison on
| their 8th or 9th sentence. Those are the guys with 8
| kids, most of whom will also end up dead or in prison.
| [deleted]
| airstrike wrote:
| > America has an unbelievable number of prisoners, which
| makes more careful and humane management effectively
| impossible.
|
| But that is such a cop out... America has the number of
| prisoners it has by choice, not due to some inexorable
| condition which differentiates it from other developed
| nations.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > But that is such a cop out... America has the number of
| prisoners it has by choice, not due to some inexorable
| condition which differentiates it from other developed
| nations.
|
| > And arguably by the point where you're locking that
| many people up, as a society that might be the point.
|
| I already covered that in my original post, please don't
| snark over things that were already pointed out.
| edbob wrote:
| > The inmates are not viewed as humans by the people
| responsible, enabling horrible conditions.
|
| This was not my experience as an inmate in Texas. Actually,
| we are referred to as "offenders" [0] because the terms
| "inmate" and "convict" are considered offensive. Staff can
| get in trouble for using a pejorative word like "inmate".
| (Not that they _never_ do because quite honestly I don 't
| know anyone that actually finds the word offensive, but it's
| still not a word you want to say in front of the warden or
| higher administrators).
|
| The truth is that staff and administrators are human and have
| diverse viewpoints. Some don't care about the inmates, but
| some really want to make a difference in the world. The staff
| are racially diverse, so you get, for example, a black
| officer that is very tough on black gangs because he thinks
| they make black people look bad, but then you have black
| staff that are particularly sympathetic to black offenders.
| You can't stereotype the staff--they're just too different.
|
| They're also paranoid about legal liability, so they are
| pretty careful about avoiding things that could potentially
| expose them to a lawsuit. It's just like any other large
| bureaucracy.
|
| > in the meantime, you would revert to pen and paper
| accounting to ensure the correct release of each prisoner.
|
| Per the article, they are in fact manually computing each
| prisoner's projected release date:
|
| > 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."
|
| [0] https://live.staticflickr.com/2048/2235184432_47cfa473bb_
| b.j...
| nybble41 wrote:
| > Actually, we are referred to as "offenders" because the
| terms "inmate" and "convict" are considered offensive.
|
| Odd. I would think "offender" would be much _more_
| offensive than either "convict" or "inmate". The "convict"
| label may be in dispute in some cases, e.g. pre-trial or
| with a case undergoing appeal, but it's hard to argue with
| the fact that someone is (rightly or wrongly) an inmate of
| a prison. To me, of the three, "offender" sounds the most
| like a pejorative personal judgement rather than a neutral
| summation of undisputed facts.
| serial_dev wrote:
| It's tragic that the wrong noun is offensive and staff is
| taught to use the "right" terms, but being not being
| released on time... Well, sorry, the software says you
| stay, you stay, even if everyone realised it's a software
| "bug" (or outdated software).
| distribot wrote:
| > This was not my experience as an inmate in Texas.
|
| Where did you do your time? Because 70% of Texas inmates
| are housed in facilities without A/C. Concrete structures
| that get up to 105 degrees. Inmate accounts of this are
| truly horrific.
|
| The state spent 7 million fighting against having to fix
| this, potentially (according to plaintiffs) more than the
| cost of fixing it. So the state is so dedicated to horrible
| conditions that they spent more money to fight than it
| would have cost to fix them. Litigation has been going on
| for years, and the state authorities are still dragging
| their feet.
|
| This is just one example of the way the carceral system
| dehumanizes people. I'm sure youre familiar with Nutraloaf.
|
| https://www.texastribune.org/2018/07/26/texas-prison-heat-
| ai...
| edbob wrote:
| The lack of A/C really sucks, and it's worse in the dorms
| which are steel buildings rather than concrete. I
| actually stayed in the top level of the dorms on the
| corner of the building that got hit hardest by the sun.
| It was hard.
|
| I call bullshit on the cost of installing and maintaining
| A/C in 100-ish large prisons being under 7 million. Back
| of the envelope, but the cost of crane rental alone could
| be millions. How much to remove (and later replace) the
| fencing to move the trucks and cranes in, and how much in
| overtime to make all this happen and provide security? We
| could be over 7 million before we even get to the
| thousands of A/C units, which will predictably fail and
| have to be replaced, with cranes, every 20-30 years. TDCJ
| maintenance is pretty good at keeping things running on a
| budget, but no heavy equipment other than boilers can be
| expected to last more than 30 years at the very most.
|
| Edit: Another article [0] made it clear that the $7
| million figure was only for the lawsuit over a single
| prison, while the cost of installing A/C in that one
| prison was estimated at $4 million, with no word on if it
| went over budget. This is true, but it's clear that the
| lawsuit would be used as precedent for requiring A/C in
| other units, so it would be more accurate to compare that
| one lawsuit's $7 million cost to the much greater figure
| of $500-1,000 million for the prison system as a whole.
| The Pack Unit is on the small side, and there are about
| 120 prisons in TDCJ, so I actually think the $1 billion
| figure seems reasonable. Note that this is just the cost
| of installation, and is not a one-time cost but will be
| repeated every 20-30 years, regardless of how much prices
| may rise. I would like to see A/C installed throughout,
| but it's important to account for the true costs.
|
| As hard as the heat was, I didn't feel dehumanized by it.
| First, the system does identify people who are actually
| at risk and houses them in cooler areas. I wasn't at
| risk, so it was merely very uncomfortable. I'm tough
| enough to handle a high degree of physical discomfort.
| Second, I felt like many of the staff would have liked to
| have A/C everywhere, and that the lack of it was due to
| decisions made long ago which will take a decade or more
| to change, as I don't think TDCJ is realistically capable
| of installing cooling systems in just a few years. Their
| efforts in court have seemed to me to be panicked efforts
| to get out of a task that they know they aren't able to
| perform, not about intentionally wanting people to suffer
| or viewing them as less than human. I will note that TDCJ
| made, and is continuing to make, radical changes to
| improve the cooling of the buildings. They have replaced
| plexiglass with steel mesh to allow airflow, issued
| personal fans to indigents and provided many, many fans
| for the housing areas. They installed swamp coolers in
| some prisons, but those aren't practical everywhere due
| to mold and corrosion.
|
| I can definitely see where people would have different
| opinions, but this was my experience. The important
| dehumanizing factors to me were the futility and
| pointlessness of wasting time there, along with the toxic
| culture and attitudes of some of the inmates. Heat would
| not make a top 5 list of dehumanizing factors.
|
| > I'm sure youre familiar with Nutraloaf.
|
| We call it foodloaf. The breakfast one can actually be
| really good, but the lunch and dinner ones can be gross.
| The problem is that you have people who constantly
| assault the guards, throw feces on them, etc., and the
| loaf delivered in a brown bag is the only meal that can
| be delivered with minimal risk to the staff. Open the
| slot, toss in the bag, close the slot as quickly as
| possible. Less than a second window to be attacked. Do
| you have a better solution that doesn't compromise
| safety?
|
| I never felt like having short-term consequences for my
| actions was dehumanizing. If I don't want to eat
| foodloaf, I don't jack off on the nurses or attack the
| guards. If I do attack the guards, I can still change my
| ways and just not attack them for 30 days (probably less
| in reality) to get normal food again. In that case, I
| actually feel like I'm being treated like a responsible
| adult. If I could behave like an animal without any real
| consequences, that would be dehumanizing to me. Not to
| mention how dehumanizing it would be to have to live with
| a bunch of people who can freely act like animals.
|
| [0] https://www.texastribune.org/2019/03/21/texas-
| prisons-air-co...
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| >The inmates are not viewed as humans
|
| Easy power comes from demonizing people we don't understand
| or don't like. Our political parties are so addicted to
| animosity, they've become incapable of functioning without
| it.
| P_I_Staker wrote:
| It depends what we're talking about. On paper our system
| isn't so different. Prisoners are people that have been found
| to transgress so many rights are forfeited, but not all of
| them. We send them to correction centers to get better. They
| leave and rights are restored.
|
| The issue is that many of the people involved feel
| differently in their hearts, and see the rehabilitative side
| as a bunch of feel good nonsense. It's never gonna work, or
| isn't worth paying for. More to the point we're chronically
| unwilling to put any resources towards these goals. It's all
| about being seen ensuring public safety and making sure no
| one gets a handout.
| edbob wrote:
| 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 correctional
| facilities are now guilty of crimes worse than the majority of
| their inmates.
|
| This is destructive thinking. There are surely some employees
| without relevant authority who are thinking "screw those
| animals", but there are surely other employees, also without
| relevant authority, who are sympathetic to the affected
| prisoners and want to see their cause prevail. None of the
| employees who work on the actual prisons have any
| responsibility for this. Releasing a felon is a huge deal and
| can _only_ be done when ordered. Only the top people at the
| DOC, at their headquarters, have any authority that could
| possibly help in this situation.
|
| About the "crimes worse than the majority of their inmates"
| part: If you compare to the crimes inmates were actually
| convicted of, perhaps they don't look so bad. But quite a few
| inmates have claimed to me to be guilty of crimes much worse
| than what they were convicted of. People get caught on the drug
| charges, but often get away with the violence. What percentage
| of rape in the hood do you think gets reported to police? 1%?
| Less?
| cwkoss wrote:
| > 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? What percentage of
| those reports results in a conviction? Probably far less than
| "rape in the hood".
| edbob wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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...
| [deleted]
| giantg2 wrote:
| Except the people in the system have immunity.
|
| Even laws like kidnapping have a motive portion, and basically
| an incompetent cop or other official can do what they and just
| claim they sucked at their job so the motive portion can't be
| met.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Well, prison fundamentally is about holding someone against
| their will. The specific issue here is that they're being held
| contrary to the rules laid out by society.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| Computer says no.
| hnedeotes wrote:
| I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
|
| (and I'm not making fun of this - it's not a situation I
| would wish to be)
| swayvil wrote:
| Computer cited as authoritative basis, we see a lot of that
| these days.
|
| Metal hand, flesh puppet.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Ouch!
| GordonS wrote:
| Yes, it is particularly ugly that they appear to be refusing to
| release prisoners they _know_ have completed their sentence,
| purely because of bureaucracy - surely there are systems in
| place for working without the software.
|
| I hope every one of the prisoners held past their release date
| sues and wins.
| trhway wrote:
| >Software Bug Keeping Hundreds of Inmates in Arizona Prisons
| Beyond Release Dates
|
| 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 -
| "software bug keeping". It isn't software who keeps the inmates,
| it is the people employed in that branch of government, and
| ultimately it is "we, the people". Blaming "computer" is as old
| an excuse as the pyramids as we still fall for it. Even more
| today i think.
| atoav wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| It is time we start taking our profession seriously, own our
| mistakes and collectively raise the stakes foe our errors.
| vburg wrote:
| No one take responsibility. Just blame the algorithm or
| something. Maybe upgrade to a deep learning black box for perfect
| deniability.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| 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.
| totalZero wrote:
| Here's a solution:
|
| Imprison fewer people so that human review of life-critical
| software applications is faster and less costly.
| swiley wrote:
| You have to avoid organizations that do the "computer said so"
| thing. They are universally pathological.
| jdeibele wrote:
| When I wanted to have compiled [1] financials,
| PriceWaterhouseCoopers told me to pick a recognized accounting
| system, then change the company'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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 1: compiled is the lowest of 3 standards that outside accountants
| can do; "reviewed" is higher and "audited" 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's outside accountants to review PWC's work and
| bring it up to audited standard.
| airstrike wrote:
| An alternative is to have the federal government offer the
| "federal choice" which states and local governments can choose
| to use instead of rolling out their own.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| In states, counties and cities a lot of contracting basically
| has the purpose of pushing money to well connected people.
| They don't want an efficient and cost effective solution.
|
| I know somebody who audits municipalities. We did a graph
| that showed relations between different players. It's
| basically just a big insider club of usually 20-40 people and
| families that give contracts to each other at the expense of
| the tax payer.
| er4hn wrote:
| This advice appears based on deficiencies in programming
| however. Programs operate on algorithms to process data. When
| the programs or algorithms fail to be able to do so properly
| the program is at fault.
|
| In your cases you have items like: accounting, building codes,
| tax codes, automobile codes, etc.
|
| While it makes sense to try and harmonize with the general
| policies, every state, every municipality, and every business
| is going to have special cases. Even software has edge cases
| for protocol behaviors.
|
| What would be nicer, imho, is if all of these laws were written
| in domain specific languages that specify the law and then the
| software could just pick up the definitions signed into law.
| Lawyers as they are feel like a combination of legal
| interpreters, combined with a combination of being red/blue
| security team members depending on what they are doing.
| reillyse wrote:
| This appears to me to be a terrible idea. In effect you would
| have private companies writing the laws of the land. "I'm sorry
| California you can't change your laws because it doesn't fit
| into the three options we have available at our preferred
| software vendor". Seems like the tail wagging the dog.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Login.gov cribbed off of the UK's digital office that built a
| similar system. I believe that's what OP was alluding too.
|
| How many unemployment systems, prisoner tracking systems, DMV
| systems do you need? These are common components across
| governments.
|
| Example: Login.gov now supports local and state government
| partners. Your constituent IAM needs can now be met by a
| federal team that is efficient and competent, instead of
| every city and state reinventing the wheel (poorly and in
| expensively).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Example: Login.gov now supports local and state
| government partners. Congrats, your constituent IAM needs
| can now be met by a federal team that is efficient and
| competent.
|
| Outside of functions that are joint state-federal to start
| with, states tend to treat the federal government as just
| another outside sovereign (and one whose Administration is
| intermittently actively politically hostile), which is
| worse than a private contractor in terms of being able to
| get them to uphold their end of a contract.
|
| So, not someone you'd outsource to unless you were more
| concerned about having someone else to blame if things go
| wrong than actually being able to assure that things go
| right.
|
| > How many unemployment systems, prisoner tracking systems,
| DMV systems do you need? These are common components across
| governments.
|
| Mostly, not, because while the names may be the same, the
| actual laws setting the system requirements tend to be
| radically different.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I have had good luck advocating for several jurisdictions
| to rely on login.gov for IAM once this support was made
| available (on my own time, acting as a product
| evangelist, because I believe in the model). YMMV.
| doomjunky wrote:
| For the sake of completeness:
|
| "Prisoners released early by software bug (2015)"
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35167191
| [deleted]
| sneak wrote:
| > _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._
|
| So the prison administration know there are people being held
| that shouldn't be held, but they are still keeping them behind
| bars.
|
| This is not a software problem.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| I expect that Arizona will end up paying in restitution to
| prisoners who served too much time _more_ 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.
| king_panic wrote:
| whoops
| f430 wrote:
| 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.
| fractal618 wrote:
| Its not a bug
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| 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.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Aside: The difference in the Citibank case is that the money
| was actually owed. Citibank was in the process of trying to get
| out of paying it when they sent payment.
|
| Also, money can be given back, time can't.
| _joel wrote:
| From what I've read and seen about the US penal system, from this
| side of the pond, is that it's a big cash cow. The cynic in me
| says they're turning a blind eye for a reason.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| It's been a cash cow since the end of the Civil War.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convict_leasing
| notwhereyouare wrote:
| That article just kept getting worse and worse. They mention
| assigning a penalty to the wrong inmate and they couldn't fix it.
|
| All of a sudden that person could no longer make calls for 30
| days, and they did _nothing_ wrong to get that.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| "Show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome."
|
| If corrections staff were held personally liable for these
| failures, or the local jurisdiction faced steep financial
| penalties, it wouldn't happen. No liability, no responsibility.
| blobbers wrote:
| These are prison workers and you're asking them to run a
| social network (with certain constraints).
|
| They wouldn't even know the first thing about how to hire
| someone capable of doing this. They'd have to hire a
| consultant to hire another consultant.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Corrections management is who I would consider the directly
| responsible party, not corrections ICs (to be clear, no
| scapegoats). The buck stops somewhere when we're talking
| about infringing on someone's right to freedom. Excuses are
| unacceptable.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The buck seems to stop at the computer/AI nowadays, in an
| alarmingly growing number institutions and companies. And
| you can't punish a computer or hold an AI accountable.
| This seems to be an end state desired by people who were
| previously accountable.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| How did they manage to do it 20+ years ago?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| 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.
|
| If it costs the prison 10x normal costs to do calculations by
| hand.. well, that's the cost of business.
| sparrish wrote:
| And that's exactly what they're doing (according to the
| article)
| mulmen wrote:
| 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?
|
| Suddenly there is an incentive to create a verifiable and correct
| system on the part of the prison-industrial complex itself.
| parsecs wrote:
| There doesn't seem to be any incentive _against_ challenging,
| so what 's to prevent some black box bureaucratic software
| pipeline to take in any challenge and automatically label them
| as "verified"?
|
| Any "third party" that doesn't belong to the prison-industrial
| complex becomes part of it if they get involved with this.
| njdullea wrote:
| $24 million dollars and no tests to assert that 'march 1 + 1
| month + 15 days == April 16th'?
|
| Geez..
| woodruffw wrote:
| 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
| _explicitly_ excludes violent felons[1].
|
| [1]:
| https://corrections.az.gov/sites/default/files/documents/PDF...
| kazinator wrote:
| > _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?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yeah, this sucks. It's (unfortunately) not surprising.
|
| My wife had a citation that affected our liberties. The cop even
| knew that he didn't have probable cause but let the charge stand
| for more than a month. Nobody in the system cares. The
| magistrates and judges don'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't
| care and even cover some of the stuff up. The DA's office doesn't
| care either.
|
| IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY
| lbriner wrote:
| In the UK, people often sue for wrongful arrest etc. and I
| though the US was much worse for litigation. Is it simply that
| the victims are mainly poor and not connected enough to sue or
| is the legal system there really that immune from action due to
| wrongful process?
| giantg2 wrote:
| According to a civil rights lawyer I talked to, the judges
| for the courts don't care unless you suffered extensive
| monetary damages. That the DA and the judges tend to side
| with the cops because they work with them on other cases
| often. On top of that, there are so many minor rights
| violations and an extensive case backlog. Issues like ours
| are common, so the system basically overlooks them so it can
| process the 1-2 year case backlog (pre pandemic times even).
| Mix that with the public perception that if you were arrested
| or cited, then you must be guilty and deserve it.
| gumby wrote:
| 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.
| tzs wrote:
| 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 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.
| gumby wrote:
| Rats, refuting my knee-jerk supposition with actual facts!
|
| Thanks for that, actually
| carbocation wrote:
| The purpose of a system is what it does.
| spoonjim wrote:
| 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.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| 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 "Time for good behavior", skipping parole, credit for
| time served you can give five people a inmate's jacket and get
| five different dates easily, and should rationally expect to.
| edoceo wrote:
| It's like gov system don't even have test cases. They should, and
| they should be public. Why aren't these softwares for the public
| open source?
|
| See also: employment security sites, cannabis track and trace,
| driving license, etc.
|
| Some of these bugs cause direct financial harm to citizens and
| this one is much worse!
|
| Show me the test cases! Show me the code!!
| sodality2 wrote:
| If my tax $ goes to it, it should have source available
| (excepting natsec). it would be nice to get some value out of
| it. If it's well written, I could learn how a large scale
| project works. If not, I can have something to petition and
| voice my concerns about, inform about vulns, etc.
| [deleted]
| lbriner wrote:
| I think there is still a genuine concern that open-source
| software allows bad people to find loopholes before the good
| people do. The last thing you want is someone finding a bug
| that allows a murderer to get released because the computer
| said-so.
|
| I think it can be managed but it is a genuine concern
| nonetheless.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I would much rather error on the side of releasing someone
| early, instead of holding people longer.
| adolph wrote:
| Well, I can't show you the test cases and code, but the
| available requirements are pretty tough to go through:
|
| https://www.azleg.gov/ARStitle/
| p_l wrote:
| In best cases, the test cases are good and pass... and yet such
| errors will still abound.
|
| Why? Because the spec for which the tests where written didn't
| include some contingency, for example with software that
| rigidly require certain steps to happen and doesn't provide a
| human-controlled override.
| neartheplain wrote:
| Reminds of the opening scene from the 1985 movie "Brazil."
| Computer misprints the name on an arrest warrant as the result of
| a (literal) bug, and nightmarish tragicomedy ensures:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFmPFLIH5s
|
| Highly underrated movie, with ever more contemporary relevance.
| [deleted]
| 1024core wrote:
| The company in question, "Business & Decision NA" is a French
| company, though their website is pretty sparse on the details:
| https://www.linkedin.com/organization-guest/company/business...
|
| So, some French brogrammers are preventing US citizens from being
| released from prison due to incompetence.
| notRobot wrote:
| Clearly you haven't read the article because it's not the
| programmers' faults. The software is doing what it was designed
| to do. The prison failed to get it updated with new
| requirements.
| fortran77 wrote:
| In reality, cruel, incompetent, and careless administrators kept
| hundreds of inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates.
| averageuser wrote:
| "Inmates walk out of prison as free people and then have to re-
| enter society. It's like they're sentenced twice."
| elihu wrote:
| > "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.
|
| 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.
|
| It'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's actual salary cost.)
|
| At least the Department of Corrections has assigned people to do
| the calculations manually. That's better, but it sounds like they
| just don't have enough people on it to keep up.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > It's gross that the decision not to fix this carries an
| apparent implicit economic calculation
|
| Spending money will remain economic decision until we can have
| government agencies fueled by the righteous indignation of
| their critics rather than having a line item added to their
| budget. Until you can convert that indignation into legal
| tender, agencies will remain subject to old fashioned
| accounting constraints.
| adjkant wrote:
| 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't make it
| straightforward, but give they itemized 3 separate fields and
| charged 185 developer hours each for them, that's just either
| insane gouging or blatant corruption right? That's nearly 400K
| for three fields being added.
|
| https://media.kjzz.org/s3fs-public/styles/special_story_imag...
| natas wrote:
| I wonder what's the underlying software stack, mainframe? oracle?
| up2isomorphism wrote:
| "Software Bug Keeping Hundreds of Inmates in Arizona Prisons
| Beyond Release Dates" - 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.
| tomcam wrote:
| Happened to me! Probably wasn'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' attention, no one ever had an explanation. Not fun.
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