When we talk about sentences, it’s in terms of months and years, time periods way too long to be overly concerned about the details.  But that’s because we aren’t the people sitting in the can, or children awaiting their father’s return home.  From our distance, a day here and there seems trivial. Not to the person on the inside.

From the Des Moines Register, it appears that prison officials in Iowa weren’t too worried about the details either.

Iowa inmates held past their proper release dates deserve to be compensated for each day they were improperly confined, according to a class action lawsuit filed this week in Polk County District Court.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Mahaska County sex offender Richard Scott and other similarly situated inmates, contends that Scott was held for 46 days too long under new rules outlined in a decision this summer by the Iowa Supreme Court.

Based upon a decision by the Iowa Supreme Court, the calculation of prisoners’ sentences “requires that any defendant committed to the state Department of Corrections for supervision ‘who has probation revoked shall be given credit for such time served.’ ”  This meant that about 3500 inmates’ sentences needed recalculating.  The state said it did.

State corrections numbers say discharge dates were checked and double-checked as part of a review completed in early November. That process led to the immediate release of 551 inmates from prison and work release programs and recalculation of a new release date for 2,588 others.

Corrections spokesman Fred Scaletta declined to comment on the lawsuit, but confirmed that “everybody who we believe changed discharge dates as a result of the recalculation, they’re out the door.”

Jeffrey Lipman, who has brought a class action against the Iowa Department of Corrections alleges that “hundreds, if not thousands,” of inmates have been held beyond their release dates.

“On information and belief, the cause of the over-detentions is a collapse of the inmate management system and deliberate indifference by defendants to the rights of detainees and prisoners to be released by their release dates,” the lawsuit contends. “Defendant has taken no action to implement an effective inmate management that can ensure release of prisoners by their release dates.”

Calculating release dates for every inmate is tricky, often contentious business, Whether time before or after the actual conviction, in physical custody or under some variant, is supposed to be clearly defined, and it’s the job of the state to make sure it’s calculated correctly. There there are the credits, which vary by jurisdiction, for good time or programs successfully completed, not to mention options that allow a prisoner to transition back into society, such as work release.  But what constitutes “correctly” is frequently in dispute.

The problem is that, for the most part, that no one is watching to make sure that the state is doing its job properly.  For criminal defense attorneys, the last time we see a defendant is when we shake their hands and wish them good luck as they walk out of the courtroom in shackles. Our job is done and they are entrusted to the care of the state. 

There is a subset of criminal defense dealing with prisoners, often consisting of lawyers in prison towns who handle their habeas claims for lousy food or religious indifference, but their focus is on prisoners who retain their services rather than systemic failures. 

An action like this has to make everyone wonder whether the system, whoever is calculating and recalculating sentences in the backroom of some Department of Corrections building, knows what they’re doing and is doing it right.  On the one hand, it would seem so utterly routine that they should have it down pat, and there’s no chance of screwing it up. 

On the other hand, it may well be so routine that an institutional mistake in the manner of calculation could go on for years, could affect thousands, and no one would know about it.  We would all just assume they know what they’re doing.  After all, they calculate release dates constantly. Shouldn’t they be able to do it right?

For the guy waiting for that glorious day when he once again gets to breath free air, the calculation is critical.  Those of us who’ve never enjoyed the largesse of the state may not think of an extra day or forty to be such a bad thing, but then we can’t begin to understand what it means to serve hard time.  While a prisoner may have done 10 or 20 years, it’s done one day at a time.  Every day matters.  And every day in prison when he should have been free matters.

Whether the Iowa Department of Corrections was wrong and stole days from the lives of inmates through it’s “deliberate indifference” to the proper calculation of release isn’t clear from the article. I strongly suspect Lipman knows what he’s talking about or he wouldn’t have brought the action.  If he’s wrong, he’ll waste a lot of time and money for nothing, and lawyers hate doing that.

But if Jeffrey Lipman is right, that Iowa just couldn’t be bothered to get the release dates right, and held prisoners who, under the law, were free men, then this is a disgrace and he ought to clean their clocks.  There’s no excuse for the failure to release a prisoner when his sentence is completed, his debt to society paid.  It’s just math.  So is the calculation of damages for the days of their lives lost to the state’s failure to do its job right.

H/T Doug Berman