The jail in a suburban Atlanta county held inmates for days who were due for release because a state database had crashed, preventing jailers from being able to check whether a person was wanted in another jurisdiction.
Officials in Clayton County said they stopped releasing inmates, including those who had been bailed out, because they didn’t want to release someone who might be wanted elsewhere for a more serious crime.
They rely on an automated fingerprint identification system to check criminal histories in a database maintained by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, officials said.
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