Mistakes and Misinformation Force Temporary Closure of Texas "Prisoner" Website

An excessive amount of mistakes and misinformation on a Texas prisoner information website caused its creators to remove it from the Internet. The Texas Tribune embraces its mission of providing the public with all the derogatory details about incarcerated Texas prisoners. Recently, however, the Tribune started getting complaints from prisoners' families that the information contained in its Texas Prison Inmate database was wrong.

"My husband couldn't understand why people were taunting him and calling him a child molester," said Lori Wallace-Wilson.

Sonny Wilson, who is serving a life sentence for aggravated sexual assault, was assigned a National Crime Information Center (NCIC) code that erroneously indicated he had been convicted of sexually assaulting a child even though his court records clearly indicate that no child was involved in his crime. It turns out that he was not the only one.

Not long ago, John Jordan, editorial administrator for the Tribune began receiving numerous calls from family members who insisted that the Tribune's information site was incorrect. When the Tribune's director of technology began to analyze the complaints he immediately discovered more than 300 prisoners who, like Wilson, were wrongfully tagged as having assaulted children. All of these men had been convicted of sexual assault but nowhere did court records indicate that their crime involved a child.

Looking for a quick fix, Tribune staff first thought to simply remove the NCIC code. But it soon discovered that many other Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) prisoners, with various convictions, had also been incorrectly coded. This required the Tribune to dig deeper in order to get to the root of the problem. Not surprisingly, it turned out that the errors stemmed from the sloppy work of TDCJ data entry employees.

Federal NCIC codes for state prisoners are manually assigned and entered by TDCJ clerical staff. More than fifty staff members assign NCIC codes to prisoners along with various other data. But, while they supposedly double check state data for accuracy the federal codes are not double checked. In fact, incorrect NCIC codes are often knowingly entered by state staff.

"The offense title on the judgment isn't always an exact match to a specific NCIC code, therefore, staff chooses the code that is the closest match to the offense title," said TDCJ spokesman Jason Clark. "There may be times when data entry staff incorrectly enters the NCIC code." Clark further admitted that Wilson's code had been incorrectly entered.

Upon identifying the state's reckless approach in assigning TDCJ prisoners' offense codes the Tribune decided, in July 2013, to pull its entire website. This is not to be mistaken for a softening of the Tribune's approach to its overall mission of exposing prisoners' records. The site was relaunched in less than thirty days. The new site simply eliminated NCIC codes and, for the moment, does not link individual prisoners to specific crimes.

It is worth considering that the Tribune's candor about its mistakes and its attempt to correct them comes in the form of an article that apologized for the inconvenience it caused to its readers. At no point do they express remorse for recklessly and wrongfully endangering the lives of men like Mr. Wilson. Instead, the Tribune was quick to downplay the seriousness of its misinformation by saying that only three percent of its information was in error. This, they say, is not unusually high given the large number of prisoners involved. But three percent of 150,000 is 450 prisoners – men, who like Mr. Wilson, have been taunted and possibly even assaulted because of false information provided by supposedly reputable sources like the TDCJ and the Texas Tribune.

The Tribune put its prisoner database back online in July 2013, with several changes: “NCIC codes are no longer associated with individual prisoner,” and “aggregate crime data – available both by county and by crime – no longer associate individual prisoners with specific crimes.”

Sources: www.texastribune.org

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