I know I'm putting on the very old, tired and threadbare "software developer tries to solve real-weird problems as if they were software" hat but these kind of stories are both legion and seemingly conceptually simple. Stepping back from the messy injustice of it all and treating the problem as essentially a customer support scaling problem, my off-the-cuff analysis is that we have a process which is too high-touch (the appeals process) which is being subjected to unexpected and unservable scale demands (the bored prisoners) leading to pathological results (prisoner appeals are ignored or subject to desultory binning).
My annoying, uneducated and probably arrogant response is that we need to introduce a lower-touch triage process in between the prisoners and the high-touch, overloaded CS department (the courts) to reduce spurious or unmeritworthy tickets (appeals) taking up too much time and increase the time departments have available to look at the meritworthy ones.
I know it's "not as simple as that" and doubtless I'm missing a million devils hiding in the details but I wonder if there's anyone in government actually tasked with finding these suboptimal aspects of the system and if not, why not? It would surely be a huge bang for the buck.
My annoying, uneducated and probably arrogant response is that we need to introduce a lower-touch triage process in between the prisoners and the high-touch, overloaded CS department (the courts) to reduce spurious or unmeritworthy tickets (appeals) taking up too much time and increase the time departments have available to look at the meritworthy ones.
I know it's "not as simple as that" and doubtless I'm missing a million devils hiding in the details but I wonder if there's anyone in government actually tasked with finding these suboptimal aspects of the system and if not, why not? It would surely be a huge bang for the buck.