McKenna: Fire the person who ignored Washington’s prison glitch

Now that Washington’s prison glitch has been revealed, former state attorney general Rob McKenna believes two things are going to happen: the state will be sued, and someone will be fired.

Washington Governor Jay Inslee announced Tuesday that it was recently discovered that a technical glitch at the state’s Department of Corrections has been letting prisoners out early over the past 13 years. Approximately 3,200 inmates have enjoyed the early release &#8212 an average of two months. Compounding the concern over the glitch, is that state employees knew it was happening for at least three years.

“It turns out, according to my sources, that they consciously, deliberately postponed this fix 16 times. That’s incomprehensible to me,” McKenna told KTTH’s Todd Herman.

Related: Prison glitch allowing early release of inmates for 13 years

That leaves a few questions up in the air, such as will the early-released inmates be forced back. McKenna, a KIRO Radio political analyst, speculates that some will.

“I don’t think it’s going to result in 12 year’s worth of inmates who were released an average of 49 days early, coming back,” McKenna said. “I think it will mostly affect people who were released recently.”

“The Governor’s office is talking about requiring people who were released early to come back in and serve the rest of their time,” he said. That is, unless they are given enough credit to wipe out the rest of the time needed to serve.

But the questions McKenna is more interested in, is what will be the result of the glitch at the state-level? For example, who made the decision not to fix the problem? Inmates have been released early since 2002, but someone discovered it in 2012. That’s three years the problem was allowed to continue.

“They need to figure out who made the decision not to fix the software glitch when it was discovered,” McKenna said. “Why they didn’t do it at the next scheduled software update, much less ever since then … when we figure out who made that decision, that person should lose their job.”

Even if the state fixes the glitch that allowed the problem to continue, Washington could be looking forward to a series of lawsuits because of it.

During McKenna’s first term as the state’s attorney general, his office conducted a study that found Washington pays out three times more for lawsuits than other states of comparable size, such as Arizona or Massachusetts. It pays six times more for tort judgements and settlements each year than Oregon, and 10 times more than Idaho. That is largely due to the state’s strict liability style, McKenna notes. Washington will pay out if it is just 1 percent liable.

“Here, however, you have an error that was known since 2012,” he explained. “Once it was discovered the state is probably on the hook for some damages if someone can prove they were hurt by someone released early and committed a bad act when they should have been in jail.”

It’s something that the Department of Corrections should have been aware of, McKenna said, because it is one of three state agencies that is involved with the largest number of lawsuits.

“We’ve paid out millions over the years because there were mistakes made,” McKenna said. “It’s impossible for me to understand how the department of corrections could have continuously put off making this software fix after it was discovered, and it’s hard to understand why they didn’t discover it sooner.”