Will anyone pay the price for prisoners early release?

Just before Christmas we learned that over the past 13 years some 3,200 inmates from the Washington State Department of Corrections facilities had been prematurely released.

When I heard the news, the initial thought was at least this bureaucratic screw up didn’t result in the loss of millions, if not billions of taxpayer dollars.

But it wasn’t long before the price became incalculable with the loss of lives.

At least two deaths that we know of have now been the result of a software glitch in DOC computer systems that mistakenly opened the cell doors for 26-year-old Jeremiah Smith and Robert Jackson, 38. Both committed deadly crimes in 2015 not long after their release.

Law enforcement officials say that less than two weeks after Smith was freed, he took part in an armed robbery in Spokane and killed 17-year-old Ceasar Medina in the process.

Jackson walked out of prison Aug. 10, four months too soon while serving a sentence for robbery with a deadly weapon. On Nov. 11 he fled from a wreck in Bellevue that killed his girlfriend Lindsay Hill, 35.

“Nothing I can say will bring back Ms. Hill. I deeply regret that this happened,” Corrections Department Secretary Dan Pacholke said — via a written statement.

Oh, how heartfelt and personal.

Doesn’t a problem that DOC had fiddled with and now fumbled for over a decade deserve better?

Gov. Jay Inslee called the news, “absolutely gut-wrenching and heart-breaking,” also in a written statement, adding, “There is nothing that can right this horrible wrong.”

Inslee said he had a lot of questions about how this happened.

But you can probably excuse the governor from not being fully on top of this. First, the problem really began back in 2002 under a previous governor, Gary Locke. And of course Inslee has been really busy lately with his trip to the Paris climate talks.

Despite not being fully up to date, Inslee said the computer program should be fixed by early January.

Which brings up my question. How can Inslee, who inherited the problem from two governors ago, be so optimistic the fix will finally happen when it has been lost in a bureaucratic maze for years?

The problem began following a 2002 state Supreme Court decision that required the DOC to apply good-behavior credits earned in county jail to state prison sentences. Nice idea but some programming code proved to be in error and now it’s a bigger problem.

As is the case with so many government FUBARS — be it federal, state or local —an investigation will take place, which Inslee said could result in the firings of some Department of Corrections officials.

Don’t hold your breath because when’s the last time you remember cutting a protected class of government employees loose without having been on paid administrative leave for a year?

Those of us in the private sector do not have 13 years to meet a deadline, nor can we likely tell our boss 16 times — the number of delays so far with the “fix” — that we’ll have the story tomorrow.

But administrative obfuscations that led to this now tragic situation seems small potatoes when it comes to waste at the state level.

Consider the sadly laughable tales of the $3.1 billion Highway 99 tunnel project that will replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle — some day.

For a project that began digging July 30, 2013 and was targeted to open for traffic by now, Bertha the tunnel-boring machine has sat largely idle and has dug only about 1,000 of the 9,000-foot structure. Latest projections call for the finish in March 2018.

According to a February 2014 report from “the governor’s expert review panel,” the project will finish on budget, but that number is a moving target with every new story. The original $1.3 billion cost of the tunnel alone most recently escalated to $2 billion.

Across town, defective pontoons for the State Route 520 floating bridge across Lake Washington have cost the taxpayers a shade under $200 million to fix and have repeatedly delayed construction. By comparison then, they appear to be a bargain when it comes to boondoggles that pushed completion from 2014 to who knows when.

Unfortunately no amount of money or firings can make up for the human toll of the most recent screw up in state government.

Paul Delaney can be reached at [email protected].