Thousands Of Prisoners Released Early Due To Software Glitch

The problem dates back to July 2002 when a state Supreme Court ruling required the DOC to apply “good time” credits earned in county jail to state prison sentences. The Corrections Department and governor’s office have not released the names of those inmates who have been sent back to prison, or the name of the family who alerted the agency to the problem. The software change in response to that decision should have excluded good time credit for extra time spent in prison due to sentencing enhancements, as required by state law, but it did not. Until then the DoC has been ordered not to release any prisoner without checking manually that they should be released. The errors mostly knocked 100 days or so off sentences, and, so far, it doesn’t look as if anyone too unsafe was released too early.

However like we said, it was too good to be true because according to reports, it turns out that it was a software glitch that saw about 3,200 prisoners get early releases. That represents approximately three percent of all releases during that 13-year time period.

“That this problem was allowed to continue to exist for 13 years is deeply disappointing”, Inslee said. But officials have identified at least seven prisoners who were freed but haven’t reached their corrected release date yet, and they will need to return to prison. But for reasons that are apparently to be investigated, a solution to the problem was delayed.

The governor has ordered DOC to halt all releases of impacted offenders from prison until a hand calculation is done to ensure they are being released on the right dates. In accordance with a precedent set by the state Supreme Court, most of those offenders who were released early will be given day-for-day credit for their time in community.

“I have a lot of questions about how and why this happened, and I understand that members of the public will have those same questions”. The DOC has been working on an updated, corrected system since, which will roll out on January 7.

An investigation is looking into why an error so grave could repeatedly have occurred over the past 13 years.