'Staff errors' led to 152 U.S. inmates serving extra time: report

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Reuters

'Staff errors' led to 152 U.S. inmates serving extra time: report

By Julia Harte
May 24, 2016

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Errors by the U.S. agency that oversees the federal prison system resulted in 152 inmates staying in prison beyond their scheduled release dates between 2009 and 2014, a government watchdog said on Tuesday.

The errors caused three inmates to serve more than one year of extra time, and cost the U.S. government at least $1 million to incarcerate the prisoners for the additional time and to settle lawsuits by four of the late-released inmates, according to U.S. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

Most of the late-released inmates served a month or less of extra time. Five federal inmates were also released earlier than they should have been during the same period, the audit found.

U.S. prison populations have soared in recent decades as a result of harsher federal and state-level sentencing policies. A recent White House economic study found that overcrowded prisons strain the U.S. economy more than they boost it or reduce crime.


Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/staff-errors-led-152-u-inmates-serving-extra-161606114.html?nhp=1

[Gene Debs]

1. I wonder how many of those staff errors weren't errors but ordered up by whichever

for-profit corporation owned the respective prisons.

[Igel]

2. "Errors by the US agency."

Mistakes happen. 152 out of a cast of many scores of thousands ain't a bad error rate. Better than most government agencies.

Take the IRS. After a review of records, they said that the ministers in the church I was working for said that they had to pay FICA. So FICA was withheld. Back FICA taxes were paid off, with interest, over a few years to avoid sticker shock.

Years later, one of the ministers said that they'd routinely signed SSA waivers--neither they nor their dependents could collect SS benefits because they'd opted out from paying FICA taxes in perpetuity.

Took a year to sort things out. The ministers needed to provide proof of their opt-out, but that had been 30 years before. The bookkeeper finally asked the case manager to check the file, who said that she'd need to contact a different office (two floors down) to get a copy of the opt-out forms that had been scanned and were part of the case file.

The first IRS case manager had seen the forms and not known what they were when he said the ministers had to pay FICA and back taxes. The second manager didn't say anything until specifically asked if the forms were in the file. Eventually the FICA taxes/penalties were refunded, and a few months later we got a letter from a third IRS agent saying that the ministers were found not to have paid FICA for X number of years, and another saying that the money had been erroneously refunded and the check should not have been cashed.

Nothing malicious in that. Just confused case workers under a deadline and possibly with case quotas. We did not tell the ministers because they'd have immediately said it was part of the government's war on religion and it was open hostility and an attempt at intimidation. (They, of course, would almost certainly have been wrong.)

Hanlon's razor: Do not attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. (Or something like that.)

[dembotoz]

3. curious...sometimes you can get payment if wrongfully inprisoned can you also get cash if wrongfully

kept past your time.

in this fucked up country the cops will probably sue for room and board