It has come to the media’s attention that for the last 13 years the Washington State Department of Corrections (DOC) has been releasing some prison inmates early because of its own computer programming glitch. Jay Inslee has now admitted that officials at DOC knew about the problem in 2012, but failed to fix it.
Now, when an extremely liberal paper like the Olympian – the only one in the state to endorse Jay Inslee for governor in 2012 – admits that state government is doing something wrong, you might expect that the paper’s editorialists will demand action.
Not exactly.
Instead, the paper ignores the obvious – that this very disturbing error took place under three separate DEMOCRAT governors, who try not to offend the very powerful state employees union that provides them with campaign cash – and is satisfied instead that Inslee has “hired two retired federal prosecutors to investigate the history of the problem and why it was not fixed in 2012 — when it first came to light under a former governor. That is appropriate.”
Instead of demanding that the responsible parties – ie, state bureaucrats – lose their jobs over what even the head of Corrections calls an “unforgivable error’, the Olympian believes that an “investigation that puts all the cards on the table for the public to see is the best way to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
In the real world, the best way to make sure that something doesn’t happen again is to hold those responsible for errors accountable, not just to “put all the cards on the table”. But that’s too far a stretch for the Olympian editorialists.
