Think twice before using the phrase “criminal justice system” in conjunction with Spokane County. “System,” after all, implies a set of orderly relationships within an organized whole.

Given the repeated lapses of communication affecting inmates supposedly under the control of Spokane County authorities, system doesn’t apply.

The most recent episode is that involving 28-year-old Jeremy Arnold, who was taken into custody Friday after failing to return from a weeklong furlough that was granted for his wedding. Arnold has such a nasty record that when they realized he was missing Spokane police issued a blunt news release saying it was imperative to track him down before he kills someone.

Superior Court Judge Linda Tompkins, who signed the furlough order, said she wasn’t advised at the time of the severity of Arnold’s criminal record, which includes two robberies, five burglaries, intimidating a couple of witnesses, domestic violence and a drive-by shooting. And escape.

He’s been getting in trouble with the law for a decade, and authorities say he’s getting increasingly violent.

Yet when he went to court and asked to be let out of jail for seven days so he could get married, nobody from the prosecuting attorney’s office argued against it. And the judge didn’t ask for a full accounting.

And if you’re wondering why somebody who’s been put behind bars because of criminal activity is entitled to get out of jail at all, let alone for a week, to get married, that’s another question. A good one, though.

The Arnold incident brings to mind another that happened just more than a year ago.

On March 29, 2004, Ryan Quaale was less than a month into a six-month jail sentence when he requested a furlough to be with his pregnant girlfriend when she had her baby. District Court Judge Brad Chinn granted it, for a month. About a week later he was arrested for drunken driving and driving with a suspended license – typical for a repeat drunken driver who already had a 2-year-old’s death on his hands. Like Arnold, Quaale also had a previous escape.

Chinn, it turned out in that case, wasn’t aware of Quaale’s pattern of probation violations, just as Tompkins didn’t know what a bad actor she was dealing with in Arnold.

Admittedly, courts, prosecutors and law enforcement agencies operate under difficult budgetary limitations, but there’s no comfort in Tompkins’ explanation: “Our system is so jammed that there is no mechanism to review all of the cases.”

Between the Quaale and Arnold fiascoes, by the way, there was the April 5 incident in which 32-year-old Eric D. Peterson was mistakenly released from the Geiger Corrections Center the day after being sentenced to 15 months in prison on drug charges.

The common theme here is a seriously flawed system – that word again – of communications. If it had been addressed a year ago following the Quaale incident, the Arnold case might have been avoided. It is critical that officials deal with it this time.

In the meantime, the fundamental presumption of innocence on which American justice stands must be preserved and honored. Once that hurdle has been crossed, though, the burden of proof shifts. Bad guys are behind bars for a reason, and in the absence of a compelling reason to free them, they should stay there.