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.

Not arguing for anything. Just observing the necessity for software. I'll leave it at that, and not put any words in your mouth.

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?

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.

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...

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.

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”).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is a matter of administrating the law. If they're unwilling to do their job, they shouldn't have that job.

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.

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.

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.