More than 3,000 prisoners in Washington have been mistakenly released early since 2002 because of an error by the state’s Department of Corrections that resulted in wrongly calculated sentences for about 3 percent of the prison population.
At a news conference announcing the error Tuesday, Gov. Jay Inslee said he has ordered immediate steps to correct the longstanding computer glitch.
“Frankly, it is maddening,” Inslee said.
Authorities say a July 2002 state Supreme Court ruling required the Corrections Department to apply good-behavior credits earned in county jail to state prison sentences. However, the programming fix ended up giving prisoners with sentencing enhancements too much so-called good time credit.
Sentencing enhancements include additional time given for certain crimes, like those using firearms or those committed near schools. Under state law, prisoners who get extra time for sentencing enhancements cannot have that time reduced for good behavior.
An analysis showed as many as 3,200 offenders were released early, and another 3,100 who are still incarcerated had inaccurate release dates.
Inslee’s general counsel, Nicholas Brown, said most of the errors were 100 days or less. In some cases, inmates were released just a few days early, but at least one person who is still incarcerated had a release date that was off by about 600 days.
Based on a prior Supreme Court ruling, most of the affected offenders won’t have to go back to prison. 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. Five of them have already been re-incarcerated.
The Department of Corrections was first alerted to the error in December 2012, when a victim’s family learned of a prisoner’s imminent release. The family did its own calculations and found he was being credited with too much time.
A timeline provided by the governor’s office shows the agency consulted with attorneys regarding the error the same month and scheduled a fix for the program. However, the coding fix was repeatedly delayed, and the governor says he didn’t learn of the issue until last week, when corrections’ officials notified his staff.
“For reasons we still don’t yet fully understand, that fix never happened,” Brown said. Corrections Department Secretary Dan Pacholke, who took over as head of the agency in October and just learned of the error last week, also said he couldn’t yet explain what happened.
“How that did not rise up in the agency to the highest levels is not clear to me,” he said.
Brown said officials don’t yet have a complete list of prisoners affected. 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.
When asked if any of the prisoners who were released early committed additional crimes, Brown said, “We don’t have the answer to that.”
Inslee told corrections officials to stop releasing prisoners affected by the glitch until a hand calculation is done to ensure the offender is being released on the correct date. A broad fix to the software problem is expected to be in place by early January.
The governor said two retired federal prosecutors will conduct an independent investigation to figure out why it has taken so long to correct the problem.
“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,” Inslee said.
Pacholke said he welcomed the external investigation.
“The agency should be held accountable for this breach,” he said.
Republican state Sen. Mike Padden said the Law and Justice Committee he chairs will convene hearings on the early releases when the Legislature returns to the Capitol in early January.
“We will see what we can find out about this and whether any of these individuals have committed crimes and what crimes they committed when they should have been in prison,” Padden said.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
Where is the accountability? If this happened in private sector the answer to what went wrong would have already been answered and people fired!
What can you expect from a Liberal State on the LEFT COAST….After all don’t Liberals believe that all Criminals are NICE PEOPLE WHO ARE JUST MISUNDERSTOOD…
Hopefully all of this garbage will be taken care of when the Conservatives get in office.
We want AMERICA back and this can NOT go on. It isn’t right. H E L P. Vote for sure.
President Trump is really going to have his hands full! But he can handle it! We, the American people are going to see a big change for the better of this once great country once he is in office! President Trump 2016!!
personal responsibility is the name of the game? Hold someone accountable, whether they opened the door, treated the paperwork in a calloused manner, or any other thing they did wrong, it should have been double checked before anyone was let out? Did a specific “criminal” get out or was this a glitch? Either way, someone is responsible. Government workers have almost no personal accountability and treat things like “shuffling a piece of paper” .in stead of an actual job…it should be taken seriously.?
If they would run the prisons like they run basic training in the army, then all our problems with unruly prisoners, and career prisoners would be a thing of the past. Our prison “baby” the prisoners to much!
Run them all like Sheriff Joe does in AZ….Like a Military BOOT CAMP…..When you SCREW UP you will get the BOOT IN THE REAR…or worse…
These characters are now hidden in the woodwork, so to speak. If they were released in error, you don’t think they’ll come waltzing back into prison…hell no! And here the worst state in the U.S. is always making it harder to get a CCW. I highly suspect that our gutless leaders have their own CCW. Cops can’t respond to 911 calls in a timely manner as it is. They come just in time to make an after the fact criminal report. What more in public places, malls, eateries, at the mivies, etc. Etc etc. One thing leads to another. Criminals lose leads to more crimes of all kinds. Everyone needs to prepare for worse case senerios. If you need explaining go to YOUTUBE and just type in SHTF and listen and learn.
Hey, the Left is on to something, of course we “Republicans” misunderstand the Criminal Element because we don’t take the time to appreciate the fact that these “so called” criminals had their “Inner criminal” scared as children by some misguided parent. Just because they grew up and shot to death some innocent bystander, or broke into to a store and cleaned the shelves and stole the money and killed the clerk on the way out, or possibly were caught selling drugs to our kids on the school yard during recess, and killed a few children by accident – come on – anyone can make little mistakes like this – Right? I personally can’t see one good reason why we should hold that against criminals, in fact we ought to chop their sentences by 9/10ths, and permit them only to spend a couple months in jail for their wrong doings, that ought to be fair enough – don’t you think?
My question is Just how in the hell, can an agency, i.e. a State since, 2002 “by accident release over 6,000 +, convicts? God, the WH, plays the American people, like there children, and they can almost get away with that mess, but now we have States, who are just so liberal, that it’s almost unbelievable. It’s our fault.