Yea, like we're a country that cares about humane treatment.

Shit, we should be like China and sell their organs n' stuff.

Geez, louis, James. And you wonder why we can torture and hold American citizens without charges?

Oh, right. "Who cares about that". I get it now.

So we started picking who would go and who would stay. Axe murders, stay. Caught with a couple pounds of marijuana, go. And there were some attorneys who would game the system by trying to hurry or slow down their clients cases. The solution to that was to adopt a FIFO policy. They would look at who had completed the largest portion of their sentence to see if they were someone they could more safely let go. So if you were at 100% capacity you didn't just let the next next guy through the door go, but look for someone who would be getting out next week. Another way of looking at it would be that if the total criminals was running at 110% capacity, you would see an average sentence reduction of 10%. Though that was the average as non-violent criminals would get out earlier than violent criminals.

Of course the over crowding meant that parole reviews were hard to fail unless you still had a bloody piece of the guard's ear when you went in to talk to the parole board.