prisons

Bad Prison Policy Risks Community Safety in Hawai’i

The state of Hawai‘i’s current prison polices risk the safety of our community and waste scarce public resources.  The decision to close Kulani prison is a case in point.

Hawai‘i’s Republican governor Linda Lingle and her prison administration are closing Kulani prison, which focuses on treatment and rehabilitation.  At the same time the administration gives $50 million a year to the private prison company Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) to imprison people thousands of miles away from home, which decreases their chances for rehabilitation and risks public safety when they are released.

Over 95% of all incarcerated people are eventually released from prison, and without rehabilitation they are likely to commit more crimes when they come back unskilled to the community.  People released from prison without rehabilitation endanger public safety.  Hawai‘i suffers such terrible recidivism that it has applied for a special grant that is only available for states with the worst rehabilitation rates.

The state has known for years it has failed at rehabilitation, and yet the current administration in particular, has continued on a path of holding prisoners for as long as it can, and not providing effective reentry services or skills to incarcerated people.

The two most important factors for rehabilitation are having a relationship with a law abiding person and decent employment.  Being imprisoned thousands of miles away from their homes, incarcerated people are unlikely to maintain or develop relationships with law abiding people or find good jobs.

After the recent sex abuse cases at the CCA’s Otter Creek prison in Kentucky, the state returned all female inmates to Hawai‘i, but it continues to keep almost 2000 male inmates incarcerated at a CCA prison in Arizona that was especially built for Hawai’i’s prisoners.  The administration has also said it may send female inmates to a prison on the Mainland closer to Hawai‘i such as the West Coast.

The state claims it saves money by sending people to the Mainland prisons.  It claimed it cost only $58.46 a day to keep someone in the Otter Creek prison compared to $86.00 a day in the Hawai‘i state women’s prison.  The reported savings, however, does not include the costs to transport people to and from the mainland, medical costs, nor the costs of maintaining state offices and personnel on the mainland to monitor the prisons there.  Why doesn’t the current administration include these obvious costs?  And more importantly, why doesn’t it consider the long term costs of recidivism from keeping people incarcerated on the mainland and in closing Kulani prison?

Kulani prison is located in the country on the island of Hawai’i.  Kulani opened in 1946 as a work camp and today is a “a 160-bed minimum-security prison that incorporates vocational training and specialized programming for male inmates nearing the end of their sentence.”

Despite the state’s need for minimum security beds for incarcerated people, the state claims closing Kulani will save $2.8 million a year.

Oddly the Lingle administration, which is now closing Kulani prison just last year asked the federal government to give it about $6 million to finance “tents” to house incarcerated people, which they said were needed.

As Kat Brady, a long time Hawai’i justice advocate, aptly points out in a recent op-ed piece to the Honolulu Star Bulletin, closing Kulani makes no sense and endangers the community.  Kulani provides much needed minimum-security beds and it has an effective reentry program providing incarcerated people with a variety of training programs.

Hawai‘i’s state government should be interested in protecting the public safety and working to ensure people who come out of prison are rehabilitated.  It should not be closing Kulani prison while continuing to send people thousands of miles a way to privately owned prisons, and then purposefully exaggerating the savings to the state.  Something is seriously wrong with this situation.  The people of Hawai‘i and those who visit and love the islands deserve better.

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