Well, it’s been a banner year for the D.C. Jail. According to WTOP, the District’s only penitentiary has mistakenly released seven inmates over the course of the last eleven months. Council-member Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), who oversees the jail, has called these slip-ups “authorized escapes.”

Alongside the allegations of torture and a $12 million settlement for inmates who claimed they were jailed longer than their terms lasted (one mentally-disabled man was kept for an additional two years), the District Department of Corrections should probably resolve to do a less terrible job in 2006.