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Comment by lvs | Hacker News Reader

Seems cruel and unusual to me.

"Many prisoners released early may not wind up being re-incarcerated, according to Brown. The law requires the state to give day-for-day credit in most cases to a prisoner who has been released early and hasn’t been found to break any laws since, he said."

It's unclear whether "breaking the law" includes speeding.

It's also unclear whether (former) prisoners must avoid breaking the law until their proper release date, or whether they must avoid breaking the law until the state discovers its mistake.

If it's the latter, it would be in the interest of an incorrectly released prisoner to inform the state of its mistake the morning after their proper release date. Of course, in this particular situation, the prisoners likely had no idea they were incorrectly released.

If you were released the average of 55 days early, my guess is that you are not re-incarcerated unless you commit another crime sufficient that you would be returned to prison. At that time the first 55 days of your sentence would be for the first crime, not the new one.

Just an assumption, IANAL.

Especially considering the average computational error was 55 days. Seems to me that this whole thing is just another bureaucrats revenge. Get those TPS reports...

>Especially considering the average computational error was 55 days.

Add to that, that the problem existed for 13 years. I would say that it's a non-issue, barely worth fixing. The persons that have been release earlier are prisoners that have shown good behavior, so I doubt that it will any more dangerous, despite the circumstances for their crime.

The law seems a little buggy to me though. Why does it even make sense that you can earn "good time", but only towards a portion of your sentence and not the whole thing? If you don't want people to get out to early just specify a minimum time that must be served.

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