contThe system recognized a financial transaction, but failed to recognize the deprivation of liberty — a human life inside a cell.

Rather than correcting the error, I was then told I would need to submit fingerprints again, despite fingerprints being taken at booking. If I was incarcerated, those records already exist.

This is not a clerical oversight. It is a structural failure — one that preserves leverage for the system while erasing lived reality.

Architecture Without Accountability

Ralina’s work exposes something most people never see: the architecture behind these failures.

Justice systems rely on fragmented databases — courts, jails, probation departments, and third-party vendors — that do not reliably communicate with one another. What becomes “truth” is not what happened to a human being, but what data happens to surface at a given moment.

This creates a dangerous dynamic:

Jail time can disappear if it is not linked to a later bond

cont