Reading through the Ars Technica post twice, it’s still unclear what the problem is. Is there a failure with the software? Is the failure due to human error, garbage in, garbage out? Is it because there just aren’t enough bodies doing input to keep up with the volume of cases? Or are the clerks confused because the lingo demanded by the new case management system is different from the old, legacy system they learned on, had gotten used to?
The question isn’t whether there is something wrong:
Typically, when a judge makes a ruling—for example, issuing or rescinding a warrant—those words said by a judge in court are entered into Odyssey. That information is then relied upon by law enforcement officers to coordinate arrests and releases and to issue court summons. (Most other courts, even if they don’t use Odyssey, use a similar software system from another vendor.)
But, just across the bay from San Francisco, one of Alameda County’s deputy public defenders, Jeff Chorney, says that since the county switched from a decades-old computer system to Odyssey in August, dozens of defendants have been wrongly arrested or jailed. Others have even been forced to register as sex offenders unnecessarily. “I understand that with every piece of technology, bugs have to be worked out,” he said, practically exasperated. “But we’re not talking about whether people are getting their paychecks on time. We’re talking about people being locked in cages, that’s what jail is. It’s taking a person and locking them in a cage.”
The outcome, that people are being arrested on vacated warrants, dismissed cases, is serious. Anyone who see this as a trivial glitch has never seen what comes of an arrest, from the potential harm done at the hands of an unpleasant cellmate to the loss of a job (and from there, a car, a house, a family) to the child waiting to be picked up at school by a parent who never arrives. The permutations are endless, but the impacts brutally real.
It might well be assumed that if there was a specific flaw, beyond characterizing the case management system that’s being adopted by a lot of courts around the country, Tyler Technologies’ Odyssey Case Manager, there would be an explanation. Despite tons of words about the harm it does and the unhappiness with the system, there is no actual explanation as to what is wrong. Why is Odyssey failing? If you don’t know what the problem is, you can’t fix it. Clearly, Ars doesn’t know. Apparently, no one knows.
“If this is the computer system, and it’s not working and people’s rights are being violated, then you need to stop using it,” Chorney said. “If there’s a way to go back to the old one, then do that; if there’s a way to switch to something else—anything else has to be better than what’s happening right now.”
Elizabeth Joh, a criminal law professor at the University of California, Davis, told Ars that this situation was alarming. “Errors do occur in the criminal justice system, but in the past only people were to blame,” she e-mailed. “How do you blame software, and who is responsible? These kinds of systemic technology problems pose a real challenge to individual criminal defendants, who may sometimes not be aware of the source of the error—and it looks like Tyler Technologies is rejecting any responsibility.”
How do you blame software? First, explain what it is about the software that gives rise to the problem. Maybe it’s too hard for court clerks to use. Maybe it takes too long, and that’s giving rise to a huge backlog in data input, increasing daily as defendants keep showing up in the dock and clerks keep falling further behind on inputting the papers, the outcomes, the cool words muttered by judges like “dismissed” or “warrant vacated.”
Or maybe this is the future of the nexus of technology and humanity. Maybe Odyssey sucks as a case management system if it isn’t used exactly the way it’s developers meant it to be used, and it was developed under the typical assumption that its users would be digital natives with all the time in the world, slaves to binary inputs, well-trained, well-maintained, all on the same page. The only thing that didn’t fit the developers’ paradigm is that no court clerk ever did anything the way the system was meant to be used.
On the one side, people pitch software all the time that makes perfect sense to devs, who create everything from user interface to required fields to highly specific input language, based upon what they think people should do. People who aren’t devs just won’t use it their way. They blame the people. The users blame the software. The defendants, the only people who are innocent of any wrong in the use of Odyssey, get locked up.
On the other side, systems work great until they don’t. That’s when devs shrug and go on the hunt for an explanation for the glitch. Somewhere in their dev brains, they find a totally reasonable explanation for why a system that’s supposed to work does its job one day and then fails miserably the next. The disconnect is that nobody gives a damn as to why it failed. That it failed is what matters. And like the computer that worked wonderfully out of the box, but three years later grinds to a halt or gives the blue screen of death, everything eventually fails.
In the past, tech people have promoted the ideas of everything from the Sentence-o-Matic 1000 to fully autonomous cars. Every shiny new thing is going to save us. As one wag noted, we’ve all experienced computer crashes. What happens when the crash is the computer that runs our cars? We will certainly get a very reasonable explanation for it afterward, but the nice folks in the car will be dead.
The idea of returning courts to the days when clerks used quills to write down every judge’s utterance, when all records were kept on parchment and bound together in leather covers for posterity, is dead. But its replacement, software that is either glitchy or dependent on users who just can’t seem to make it happen, puts people in jail who shouldn’t be there.
Between the love of shiny toys and the purported convenience tech offers, the outcome of people being wrongfully arrested is intolerable. The purpose of the system isn’t to keep software devs in business, but to keep innocent people from being jailed. We seem to have forgotten why we’re doing all this, and it isn’t working out nearly as well as promised.
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Travis County contracts with Tyler Tech for software for the JP courts. A plaintiff can theoretically use their software to file a complaint online. I tried to do that, and my conclusion was that Tyler Tech is a marketing firm with the bright idea of promising low or zero cost software for cash-strapped governments (supported by user “convenience fees”) and then attempting to fulfill thst promise with $2.00/hour third-world programmers. The question wasn’t what was broken; more like whether this software, as conceived and implemented, could possibly work for anybody.
But they said so. And why do you hate third-world programmers so much?
I don’t. I wish ’em all the best. In this scenario, my boundless contempt is reserved for the managers and business types whose capabilities end at their correct calculation that the hourly rate for five foreign programmers plus one history major hired away from McDonald’s (to talk to the customers and define the requirements) plus two womyn-studies majors hired away from Starbucks (to do the Q/A and make sure there is no text in the prompts that would make anybody cry) is less than the hourly rate for a local excellent programmer.
What Patrick said. That a software meant to tell the police who should be in jail doesn’t work right is a failure at multiple levels; understanding requirements, UI design, architecture, planning, implementation, software testing, debugging, more debugging, and yet more debugging, then finally user testing, and those failures don’t happen in competently run and experienced environments. If I’d been the CIO involved I’d have required that it be run in parallel with the existing system until we were sure it wouldn’t arrest the wrong person by mistake. Plus the question of who isn’t being arrested is probably giving someone nightmares.
Fortunately, the lawsuits will probably bankrupt the software company. Unfortunately, that means the courts using it will be stuck with unsupported fuckup-ware.
Because they can’t cut the mustard as programmers, perhaps?
There’s also an issue with cross-cultural communication and awareness. Guy I work with immigrated here, became a citizen, worked for 10 years, so our employer sent him back to Bangalore to manage a team of native developers because he could theoretically bridge the gap. Within a year, he was begging to be transferred back because he’d assimilated too much of American business culture to work with them.
” …for now the county doesn’t seem to be interested in pulling the plug on its $4.5 million deal with Tyler Technologies.” First world prices.
In this context, the problem with using third-world programmers (if they do) is that the turn-around time for fixes is much longer than for programmers who are on the spot.
Does it take a lot longer for the telephone to reach Mumbai than it does to reach Palo Alto?
It’s a time-zone thing. Cheap. Not terrible. Willing to be woken up in the middle of the night. Pick two.
Not to mention a local holiday thing. Ever tried to get something urgently fixed only to find that the guy with the knowledge has a couple days off for a local religious festival? And getting someone else up to speed will take more time than just waiting it out.
Wow, they’re collecting on both ends. Well, somebody has to sneak some dosh to the decision makers at the county.
Welcome to Progress! Soon, if you are indigent, your assigned attorney, Siri, will devote as much computer time as necessary (nanoseconds) to reach a fair and balanced plea deal. Or you can go for an actual trial before Judge Hal. Judge Hal will also handle your trial if you opt to engage your own private attorney, Alexa or Google. And RoboCop will handle the warrants.
Dr. SJ calls the google flavor Iris. She thinks it’s hysterically funny.
At least it’s a step up from ED-209.
Don’t hate on poor ED. I’m sure the local PD will set him to “Loyal as a Puppy”.
When that happens court rooms will look like the one in the second episode of Blake’s 7, where the prosecution and defense counsel enter the data into a computer and the computer decides.
It’s not necessarily the programmers. The responsibility likely lies with two other groups.
First, the systems analysts and designers. These are the people who draw the information flowcharts and decision trees describing the logic of how systems are to operate. For every line and every box in the flowchart, there needs to be software to make those information transfers and processing steps happen. Project managers ensure that the programmers write software for each of these. Overlook one, and there are problems. Flowchart incomplete or faulty logic, and there will be problems.
Second, the people who design and execute testing ensure that systems meet their specifications. Good test design includes testing for many different combinations of inputs and variables. Testing also needs to include answering, “What happens if X doesn’t occur as expected?” Inadequate testing will assuredly lead to problems.
Software development typically happens according to a schedule and meeting milestones along the way to completion. Earlier steps in the development and testing process often take greater than planned time to complete. Project managers have the imperative to deliver on time. What large step suffers? Testing.
There are strong ways that both customers and software sellers can prevent buggy software from getting into the hands of customers. For a variety of reasons, bad software leads to the problems described in this article.
Who doesn’t love people inside a bubble rationalizing why their failures are all fixable inside the bubble, when everyone outside the bubble doesn’t give a shit except for the fact that they fail.
Well, either that, or you can write laws that make the liability cost for failure to test both larger and more certain than the “savings” from failing to do so.
As a tech developer myself, I’m constantly getting frustrated when I develop data-entry screens allowing the entry person to make all sorts of fine, subtle, nuanced distinctions, and then find that the actual real-world people using it almost always do their entry in a hamhanded way that totally ignores those distinctions.
I used to do beta testing for GoDaddy, as I was always the first person to use their blogging software in the early morning and would tell them what was wrong with it right away. I never used it the way it was designed to be used. They told me I was wrong. I told them, tough shit, I’m a user and I don’t have to use it their way. They hated that.
A good programmer understands that users make mistakes and do “creative” things, and they make provisions for that before letting their code out the door. Bad programmers know they understand the “right way” to enter data far better than the experts in law or criminology they are serving. Feh!
This is why there are now advanced degrees in Human-Computer Interaction. The program in SUNY Oswego, for example.
I develop and design my input screens based on real users testing prototypes and explaining how they do their jobs. What I think is generally irrelevant, since I am not someone who enters thousands of data items daily.
The issues described here are indicative of poorly designed software created by developers and designers who have little clue as to how users do their jobs. And, project managers who don’t give a crap about successful implementation.
At least I can console myself that if I screw up a program this bad, there’s no chance of someone dying. They might not get their invoice paid on time, but they won’t die.
It’s easy to hate on developers, since they can be way out of touch. But they’re not the likely problem here. Tyler Technologies’ software is used by hundreds of counties and several states in the US. Only three courts that I could find have complained of these problems since 2014, without (as SHG noted for this case) offering any specific examples of software bugs or defects. Given those facts, isn’t it more likely that the problem is with these particular end users’ computer literacy or application-specific training, rather than with the vendor or the software itself? At some point, individual courts need to take responsibility for making sure their clerks are able to use the tools required for their job, whether that’s quill and parchment or enterprise software.
I’m not sure who is to blame, but implementing Odyssey on the criminal side first — rather than the family, probate or civil side of the court seems really stupid given the higher stakes involved on the criminal side.
Or maybe it just tells me something about our priorities.
On the other hand, it’s been a windfall for bail bondsmen and private contractors to the courts and police. In the past few weeks, one couple I know were hit for $2,500 to a bondsman to cover bail on a bench warrant that turned out not to exist *and* a little under $1,000 to free an auto booted for [not actually un]paid tickets. At least they’re getting $800’s worth of twice-paid tickets refunded from that grand — but the $200 fee to the Berkeley contractor responsible for booting duties appears to be a loss.
At least it’s good for the economy. See? A silver lining!