I think....that the engineers created Sentience, possibly even Acumen, to base their decisions on a set of criminal wrongs that aren't tailored to individual realities.
In other words, there are some jurisdictions that might be considered 'errors' by inmates imprisoned here, but they base their decisions on a limited command set, which expands as they learn from us, although...we can't contest our sentence.
Even the Engineers themselves were imprisoned, for their crimes of constructing the Asylum this way.