Ten of eleven DA offices answered my records requests. More than six million charges later, here is what the data shows — and what the state's own auditor, oversight board, and researchers say about the system it lives in.

Massachusetts has decided to lead the country on artificial intelligence. Over the past two years, the state has put a hundred million dollars into a new AI Hub, placed a ChatGPT assistant on the desks of forty thousand state employees, and directed every agency to work out what the technology can do for the public’s business. The public is warier than its government: two thirds of Massachusetts voters tell pollsters they are more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence.1

Massachusetts has not extended its technology modernization to the offices with the most direct power over ordinary life in the Commonwealth: the eleven District Attorneys. The state elects one for each county or small group of counties, and each runs an independent office that answers, between elections, to no governor, no mayor, and no oversight board.2 Their Assistant District Attorneys (ADAs) decide every day who gets charged with a crime, who gets offered a way out of one, and who gets left alone.

All eleven District Attorneys’ offices run on a shared database called DAMION, which holds the record of essentially every criminal case in the state and is roughly twenty-five years old.3 Even the offices that use it every day do not defend its age. The Massachusetts District Attorneys Association (MDAA), the nonprofit through which the eleven offices share funding and technology, describes DAMION in its request for proposals for a replacement as “implemented approximately 25 years ago” and “nearing its end of life.” The State Auditor went further this past November, reporting that the case management system used by all eleven offices "is obsolete and… may soon no longer be supported by the software manufacturer."4 When DAMION came online in the early 2000s, most Americans with internet at home still connected through a screeching dial-up modem, and the iPhone was still years away.5 AOL shut down its dial-up service last fall, by which point about one American household in a thousand still used it. DAMION remains in daily use by every District Attorney in Massachusetts.

  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    Age alone doesn’t tell you much about a system’s quality. Well-maintained systems can stay alive for decades and achieve a defect rate that a greenfield effort could only dream of.

    We have a tendency to use “legacy” as an insult, but software tends to only stick around for decades if it’s so valuable that it’s hard to replace.

    Legacy (aka This Is Not a Rails Shop) - Chad Fowler

    • Dave.@aussie.zone
      2·
      1 day ago

      The article is quite fixated on how dialup was around in the early 2000s, and how Americans used dialup in the early 2000s with screeching modems, and how AOL turned off their dialup last year and only a thousand people were using dialup by then.

      But there’s no indication that this has anything to do with the application, except for maybe everyone used a popular means to connect to the Internet to use it when it was first built.

      Now if someone maintained a bank of modems and people legitimately called them up and connected to the system like it was an ISP, and it was secure by way of that was the only way to access it as opposed to over the Internet, then sure, I can see that maybe it’s time to work on that part.