Talk Story
HAWAII'S in the market for a new prison to replace the Oahu Community Correction Center in Kalihi. Under one proposal, 1,720 new prison beds would replace OCCC's 952. Besides being too small, OCCC has other problems. Ted Sakai, public safety director, says, "It is old, it is not secure and it takes a lot of staff." State’s prison proposal
is a good place to startThe proposed prison, built next to the existing Halawa Correctional Facility, would cost $8.4 million a year to operate, compared to the $20 million spent running OCCC. It would employ 67 fewer staff members, saving another $2 million a year.
So, according to the numbers reported Tuesday, the state could save $13.6 million a year, while increasing prison capacity by 768 beds. It also could raze OCCC, an eyesore in a densely built commercial area.
Where do we sign?
I'VE SUGGESTED before that the state consider contracting with private prison developers and operators to create a local prison industry, which could prosper from the surplus of federal prisoners created by stricter sentencing laws. This would mean many new jobs and bring in outside dollars to buy goods and services.
An expanded prison system also could absorb the 1,200 or so inmates that Hawaii now ships to Minnesota, Arizona and Oklahoma -- along with $22 million a year -- because we don't have the space.
It has been cheaper to send inmates to the mainland than to keep them here. We reportedly spend $85 per day per inmate in Hawaii. Other states take them off our hands for $50 per day.
But the proposed prison's capacity appears insufficient to bring back all the prisoners we've sent to the mainland.
With all the hard work involved in realizing a project like this, building a new prison that's overcrowded from the start doesn't make sense.
Private prisons aren't new. California has opened nine of them since the late 1980s to house minimum-security inmates at lower costs. They aren't perfect, but, according to the Los Angeles Times, "They have done well in recent state audits for their job training and community service programs."
For example, the 288-bed Baker Community Correctional Facility between Los Angeles and Las Vegas trains inmates in rescue skills. They provide emergency fire department staffing on a desolate, accident-plagued stretch of Interstate 15.
Increasingly, cash-strapped local municipalities across the country use convicts to do jobs that public employees used to do. In Louisiana, for example, they set up tables and tents for fairs, string up Christmas lights, repair roofs, strip and wax floors, clean museums, landscape school and park grounds and lay sidewalks.
According to The New York Times, a Justice Department national survey found that 124,000 state prison inmates and 45,000 inmates in local jails worked off premises in 2000. That's 10.4 percent of state prisoners and about 7 percent of the jail population.
Besides filling the demand for manual laborers, these programs relieve overcrowding and supplement prison budgets. They also help inmates. "The offender needs to be doing something to prepare himself for release and be seen repairing something broken in the community," Carl Wicklund of the American Probation and Parole Association told the Times.
POWERFUL UNIONS oppose both private prisons and inmate work programs.
In California, after contributing $241,000 to Gov. Gray Davis's re-election campaign, the prison guards union won his support for boosting a guard's average base pay from $50,000 to $65,000.
The Los Angeles Times asked readers to "compare that figure to the $47,000 average yearly salary for the state's credentialed public school teachers, who must have a college degree and a year of postgraduate training."
The guards also recommended closing five of the state's private prisons. Davis says this will save $5.1 million a year while the Times says it will force the state to build new prisons at $500 million a pop.
That's criminal.
John Flanagan is the Star-Bulletin's contributing editor.
He can be reached at: jflanagan@starbulletin.com.