US Monitoring Database Reaches Limit, Quits Tracking Felons and Parolees

An anonymous reader writes "Thousands of US sex offenders, prisoners on parole and other convicts were left unmonitored after an electronic tagging system shut down because of data overload. BI Incorporated, which runs the system, reached its data threshold — more than two billion records — on Tuesday. This left authorities across 49 states unaware of offenders' movement for about 12 hours." As the astonished submitter asks, "2 billion records?"

Comments

Re:Oh dear oh dear oh dear

[Ironhandx]

And you are clearly completely unaware of the accounting world.

I have yet to meet an accountant that knows much of anything about access or any other database system. On the other hand the majority of them have complained about the 65000 line limit in excel.

They ALL do this. You're telling thousands of accountants to change how they do things, and honestly, not for the better. They know how to use excel and know how to make things balance with excel.

A large portion of them took accounting because it was supposed to make them a lot of money, these people don't even use 1/10th of the functionality provided in excel, lets not try to make them learn another entirely different software skill set, ok?

Even if you're currently working in IT and are like "Oh, no, our accountants have access to all this stuff in our system and they would never do that". Trust me, they do. It all ends up in an excel sheet somewhere eventually.

Maybe the answer isn't better software

[assertation]

Maybe the answer isn't better software, but fewer criminals to fill up the database with.

I keep seeing articles here and there how the U.S. has more people imprisoned than China. A large chunk of the prison population are inmates convicted of drug crimes and a large portion of that set of people were convicted on marijuana laws.

I don't smoke, but as a tax payer I would rather see the government make marijuana into a tax revenue generator instead of a huge expense to paid for with taxes.
 

Re:1 in 31 US Citizens in custody or parole

[tverbeek]

25% of federal inmates are in there for drug possession. I bet you a good amount of these people wouldn't rob you at gunpoint.

Not before their incarceration, no. But after surviving lock-up in a Darwinian environment in which "fittest" equates to "most dangerous", then re-entering a society in which convicts are denied the right to a good job, there's a pretty good chance they will. We have a criminal justice system that develops criminals.