Thousands of lawbreakers – proven and suspected – pass through the Spokane area’s corrections facilities every year. The barrier between them and the public consists of concrete walls, steel bars and paper.

Yes, paper. The kind that, if mishandled, allows inmates to sidestep the concrete walls and steel bars.

Consider the case of 23-year-old Jaycee Carrywater, who was booked into the Spokane County Jail as an attempted murder suspect on Jan. 12. That’s when jail personnel realized they had released him three days earlier by mistake. The warrant that came to the jail on Jan. 9 had been filed as if he were being brought in, rather than already there. Other jail personnel, meanwhile, were waiting for the misfiled paperwork because if it didn’t arrive within 72 hours of his arrest, they had to let him go, which they did. If it weren’t for that error, Carrywater would have been behind bars at the time of the drive-by shooting in which he is now a suspect.

If this sounds familiar, flash back a year and a half. Because of a paperwork gaffe, inmate Charles J. Johnson was let out of Geiger Corrections Center on July 11, 2004, a year ahead of time. The filing system, it seems, identified his release date by month but not by year.

Johnson, who’d been in prison for beating his sons and kicking in a girlfriend’s door, turned himself in after a couple of weeks, but not before terrifying his children’s mother by phoning to say, “I’m out.”

Officials at Geiger and the County Jail review these incidents and make improvements. Jail Commander Jerry Brady says he believes that if a problem can be anticipated, it can be prevented. He has met with his staff and imposed new requirements that include checking in person to see if someone named in a warrant is already in jail.

Such steps are appropriate but still reactive. Systems should be reviewed regularly, before incidents happen. Potential problems need to be searched out and fixed in advance. When public safety is at stake, no procedure can be too meticulous or too redundant. Checks and double-checks must be routine.

It’s true that the huge caseload involved makes human error likely. But as the events that followed Carrywater’s and Johnson’s mistaken releases demonstrate, that volume also demands that such error be prevented.