The Nebraska Department of Correctional Services failed to apply good-time sanctions to records of 187 inmates, and 45 of them got out earlier than they would have if the sanctions had been properly applied.
Director Scott Frakes said Thursday that nearly 140 inmates will receive notice of updates to their institutional records to reflect those disciplinary sanctions previously ordered but not applied.
The department discovered the error, he said, when it was notified a court had overturned a disciplinary action of an inmate. When officials went to restore the inmate's good time, they saw it had never been entered. That triggered a review of 10 years of records.
During that time, 204 sanctions were incorrectly recorded out of more than 15,000 good-time sanctions recorded, Frakes said.
The amount of time assessed for the sanctions ranged from 15 days to 180 days, depending on the nature of the misconduct. In addition to loss of good time, inmates may have received other disciplinary sanctions, including canteen restrictions and loss of yard, phone, visiting or furlough privileges.
People are also reading…
The 45 prisoners released earlier than they would have been if sanctions were applied jammed out without parole. None will have to return to prison, Frakes said. Of those 45, two committed misdemeanors after leaving prison at a time they should have been incarcerated.
Frakes emphasized the records error was not a miscalculation and did not impact court-ordered sentences. Rather, it affected the amount of good time deducted from sentences as a result of violations that happened during incarceration.
"Fortunately, many of the people who are still with us will get parole, and so this will have no impact on them," he said.
For those who have requested to have good time restored because they have been behaving since they lost it, odds are it will be restored unless it was taken away for a high-level violent act, he said.
When sanctions are given to a prisoner, it is a two-step process to record them, first to enter the findings of a disciplinary hearing, then to record any loss of good time in a separate area, Frakes said. That second entry sends a report to the records staff to adjust the tentative release date because of that loss of good time.
All of the entry failures were chalked up to human error, involving more than 40 workers making the errors over 10 years, while logging 15,000 entries for losses of good time.
It was just one of those things that went on for a long time, he said, and the right conditions never occurred that led to discovery of the errors.
The state's good-time law effectively cuts sentences in half, but that time can be added back for violations.
Loss of good time is one of the sanctions authorized by the department when an inmate commits an infraction, such as use of drugs, possession of contraband, assault or other behaviors that are prohibited, Frakes said. When good time is taken away, unless restored, an inmate will serve more time than would be normally expected.
Frakes said hearings are held when a violation occurs in prison, and the inmate is informed about what sanctions will be assessed and the right to appeal.
In these cases, inmates were notified but sanctions were not properly documented, and tentative release dates not changed.
"It does not impact a person’s ability to receive parole, nor does it change someone’s sentence structure or the amount of time a judge ordered them to serve,†Frakes said.
In 2014, before Frakes arrived, sentence miscalculations led to the inadvertent early releases of hundreds of Nebraska prison inmates. It had developed because of bad decisions and an aversion by those in charge to change a nearly two decades-old manner of hand-calculating release dates for inmates with mandatory minimum sentences, even after the state Supreme Court clearly spelled out the correct way in a February 2013 ruling.
The department went to an automated system of calculating sentences in 2016, with new software that verifies the amount of time an inmate spends in prison, any mandatory minimum prison sentence requirements and misconduct history. That system was unrelated to this one, Frakes said.
“We have taken appropriate steps to assure that this does not occur going forward,†he said.
Records employees will be running a double check from now on to verify all loss of good time is recorded, he said. And, before the end of the year, the system will be changed to require entries in both of the two-step process.