[ OUR OPINION ]
It’s time to rebuild
state prisons, jailsA tour of Oahu's pretrial detention facility and a newly built federal detention building should have convinced state legislative leaders of the need for a new jail. Governor Lingle has begun a review of the state's correctional facilities and concluded that they are inadequate. Next year's Legislature should begin the large undertaking to replace them over a period of years.
THE ISSUE
The Lingle administration plans to ask the Legislature to begin building new jails and prisons to replace aging facilities.
In last year's election campaign, Lingle promised to build two privately financed, 500-bed drug treatment correctional facilities, but that proposal may have been too modest. She now says all four of the state's detention facilities, including the crowded Oahu Community Correctional Center in Kalihi, need replacement. Rep. Eric Hamakawa and Sen. Colleen Hanabusa, heads of the Legislature's judiciary committees, agreed after touring the state and federal facilities this week that improvement is needed.
"The contrast is phenomenal," Hanabusa said of the state and federal facilities. OCCC, a cluster of modules along the western end of Dillingham Boulevard, was built to hold 628 inmates but now houses more than twice that many. A two-year-old, 12-story federal building near Honolulu Airport houses more than 500 defendants awaiting trial but can hold up to 900. Some state defendants are held in the federal facility at state expense.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued the state in 1984 because of overcrowding and unsafe conditions at OCCC and the women's prison, and the state entered into a court decree to improve conditions and limit the prison population. The state came into compliance with the decree in 1996, but OCCC's prisoner population now exceeds the facility's capacity, as do the number of inmates in each of the three neighbor island facilities.
More than 2,000 convicted felons are housed in prisons at Halawa and Waiawa on Oahu, a Big Island prison and the women's prison in Kailua, all of them exceeding capacity. Because of the limitations, 1,200 are incarcerated in privately operated prisons on the mainland. The new facilities should expand the state's prison capacity to allow those inmates to be brought back to Hawaii, increasing rehabilitation efforts and ending the drain of $25 million a year to other states.
Lingle says she probably will ask the Legislature for money to build one new prison and begin replacing the Oahu and neighbor-island detention facilities. Public Safety Director John Peyton has floated a proposal to rebuild the Maui jail, and the administration also has suggested that the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands provide land for a new prison on the Big Island.
The existing detention facilities "are not places we would want to invest more money," Lingle told the Star-Bulletin's Richard Borreca. "They are just not functional. They were built for a much smaller prison population, and I don't think they were built with any prison expertise."
