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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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010989
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01098900.038
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1990-09-17
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NATION, Page 29American NotesPRISONSCriminal Charges?
There was something about the scheme that just did not compute.
Under a recent contract between the federal Department of Housing
and Urban Development and the U.S. prison system, 45 inmates at the
Federal Correctional Institution in Lexington, Ky., were set to
work entering data from thousands of applications for FHA insurance
into a computer. But Beverly Hirsch, 36, who is serving a 40-year
sentence for credit-card and check fraud, was surprised to see that
some forms carried not only information on applicants' income and
debts, but their bank-account and credit-card numbers as well. "The
information they were giving me in here was what I worked pretty
hard on the outside to get," says she. Concerned that some inmates
might try to cash in on the information, Hirsch alerted reporters
and the U.S. Attorney's office. That led Warden Patrick R. Kane to
shut down the operation last month and call in the U.S. Secret
Service to investigate whether any of the data improperly fell into
the hands of prisoners. HUD, says Kane, was "supposed to send in
information that was not sensitive. If I've got your credit-card
number, that's damn sensitive." So far, no frauds have turned up.