Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates
This is an outrage.  It is also a perfect example of how software is used to create increasingly more elaborate and faceless bureaucracies that force individuals to spend more and more time contending with them.  Somehow software has become the ultimate vehicle for bureaucratic violence.  Software is simultaneously infallible and the perfect scapegoat.  The inmate who lost their phone privileges for 30 days is an example.  They did nothing wrong but the computer says so and nothing can be done.  The computer is right in the sense that its decision cannot be undone, and solely to blame since no human can undo its edict or be held accountable, apparently.  It is tragic and absurd.<p>There was an Ask HN question the other day where the poster asked if the software we are building is making the world a better place.  There were hardly any replies at all.  Is this because for the most part our efforts in producing software are actually doing the opposite?  It certainly seems that way reading articles like this.