And while prisons in the islands might be overcrowded, the state's incarceration rate remains one of the nation's lowest.

A report released yesterday by the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics reveals that Hawaii's prison population grew by 6.8 percent from 1994-1995. That is precisely the national average, and far below states such as North Carolina (24.2 percent) Mississippi (19.0 percent) and Idaho (18.4 percent), which registered the largest increases in the nation.

On the other hand, it is higher than about half the states, including the handful that registered declines in the prison population.

According to the report, Hawaii had 217 felons in prison per 100,000 residents. The rate was lower than all but 15 states, and is about half the national incarceration rate of 409.

"I would imagine an incarceration rate like that is what a state government would want," said Darrell Gilliard, a statistician with the Bureau of Justice Statistics. "It means you're keeping things pretty much in check."

The study found that in 1995, Hawaii had 3,550 inmates in federal, state and local prisons, up from 3,333 the previous year. Nearly three-quarters of those inmates (2,590) were felons sentenced to more than one year in prison.

Nationally, nearly 1.6 million men and women were in prison in 1995, about two-thirds of them sentenced to at least a year. Although the number of inmates was at an all-time high, the 6.8 percent rate of increase was below the 8.4 percent average annual increase over the past decade.