---

Private prison woes call
for more prisons

THE ISSUE Some guards at a private Colorado prison where Hawaii inmates are held were fired after their criminal records were revealed.

FLAWS in the operation of a private prison in Colorado where Hawaii women are inmates should accelerate efforts to build more prisons in the islands. The state pays less to the private prisons than it would cost to keep them in Hawaii, but economizing may carry an extra price in the form of higher recidivism and lower standards.

Five officials at the Brush Correctional Facility were charged earlier this month with sexual misconduct and smuggling tobacco into the prison, which holds 80 female inmates from Hawaii, 73 from Colorado and 45 from Wyoming. The charges prompted a review that resulted in the finding that five convicted criminals and three people with questionable backgrounds had been working at the prison. All but one have since resigned or been fired.

Alison Morgan, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Corrections Department, said GRW Corp., the Tennessee-based company that operates the prison, had sent fingerprints of its guards to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation for background checks but they were smudged or otherwise unreadable. She said the prints were sent back to the prison, but GRW failed to follow up with new prints.

None of the guards with criminal records were among those charged with sexual or contraband offenses, but both sets of guards point to an institution in need of stiffer standards of operation and closer scrutiny by Hawaii officials. Richard Bissen, Hawaii's interim director of public safety, says state monitors visited the prison in February after the sexual offenses were reported.

More than 2,000 Hawaii inmates are held in private prisons in Colorado, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Arizona. An analysis last year found that 90 percent of the Hawaii prisoners incarcerated on the mainland commit subsequent crimes, compared with a recidivism rate of 47 percent to 57 percent of those imprisoned in the islands. Those figures and the recent revelations in Colorado show the ramifications of cost-cutting.

---

BACK TO TOP
|

Six-party nuke talks
should resume

THE ISSUE North Korea has indicated that it might be willing to return to six-party talks on nuclear disarmament.

SECRETARY of State Condoleezza Rice appears to have succeeded in drawing North Korea back to six-party talks aimed at ending its nuclear threat. A Pyongyang official has conveyed to China that it might be willing to resume the talks, but Rice will be the first to acknowledge that the crisis is a long way from being resolved.

At every stop in her week-long tour of Asia, Rice urged China to put more pressure on North Korea to return to the nuclear disarmament talks. At the end, Pyongyang's visiting premier to Beijing said it might be willing to return to the talks "if conditions are right in the future." The North has demanded in the past that the United States end its "hostile policy" and apologize for calling it an "outpost of tyranny."

That had been Rice's description of North Korea, but she referred to it as a "sovereign state" in a speech in Japan. She repeated that the United States would join its allies in providing Pyongyang "the respect it desires" and "the assistance it needs, if it is willing to make a strategic choice for peace."

North Korea departed from the talks last June after the other five parties -- the United States, Japan, South Korea, China and Russia -- offered Pyongyang security assurances, aid, fuel and other inducements in return for disarmament. It said last month that it had nuclear weapons and would not return to the talks.

Rice referred to the stick to go with those carrots as "other options." Without spelling them out, those are believed to entail going to the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions.

Even if North Korea would return to the talks, there is no assurance that the crisis will be resolved. Rice said the goal is to "not just get North Korea back to the table but get North Korea back to the table ready to be constructive." China's pressure will be crucial in achieving that goal.