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A software issue caused Arizona prison inmates to be stuck behind bars longer than legally allowed.
A separate software issue resulted in potentially thousands of inmates wrongly held in max custody.
Other software issues have led to fatal outcomes, leading experts to call for increased oversight.
It s easy to forget just how much of the modern world is powered by software, from trains and planes to emails and file transfers. Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) s National Prison Project, says that when software is working behind the scenes, that kind of business operations stuff, you just assume normally it s doing its job.
Thousands of incarcerated people in Arizona have been kept behind bars by a software glitch, according to a report by KJZZ broadcast Monday. Anonymous whistleblowers from the Arizona Department of Corrections whistleblowers leaked details about the situation to the Phoenix NPR member station.
Arizona has the fifth highest imprisonment rate in the country, and its incarcerated people are mostly nonviolent drug offenders. In 2019, the state Legislature passed a law aiming to change that by providing a way for nonviolent criminals to secure early release. For every seven days spent in a GED or substance abuse treatment program, an incarcerated person can shave three days off a sentence. In 2019, the Arizona Mirror estimated that under the law, nearly 7,000 incarcerated people could become eligible for early release, allowing them to shorten the length of their sentence by up to 70 percent. But so far, that hasn’t happened and software may be to blame.
Whistleblowers: Inflexible prison software says inmates due for release should be kept locked up behind bars
It s not a bug, it s a feature you need to put in a change request to alter, says developer Share
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Updated Prison inmates in Arizona who should be eligible for release remain incarcerated because the state s inmate management software can t handle sentence adjustments, it is claimed.
According to public radio station KJZZ, unidentified whistleblowers within the Arizona Department of Corrections revealed the software problem, which is said to have been known by department IT leaders since 2019.
The software, ACIS (Arizona Correctional Information System), implemented in 2019 at a cost of $24m by IT biz Business & Decision, North America, is said to contain a module for calculating the release dates of inmates.