Tough choices on Hawaii’s prisons and jails lie ahead, official says

It has been nearly 40 years since a new prison or jail opened in Hawaii, and the leader of the state’s deteriorating network of correctional facilities says the state must finally make the hard decisions about replacing its rundown old lockups.

Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Director Tommy Johnson says he plans to ask for nearly $125 million in each of the next two fiscal years, mostly for maintenance projects such as replacing a collapsing fence at the Maui jail and installing a new emergency generator at Halawa prison.

That is just for starters. Even if the Legislature and Gov. Josh Green agree to spend those many millions, the most difficult decisions lie ahead.

The department’s wish list also includes building an entirely new jail for Kauai to replace the old jail that sits in a flood zone, and an entirely new jail for Kona on the Big Island.

By far the biggest and most controversial pending project is construction of a new 1,300-bed jail to replace the old and inefficient Oahu Community Correctional Center in Kalihi, a plan that has been the focus of more than a decade of debate and controversy.

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The Oahu jail project is expected to cost about $1 billion, and Johnson said lawmakers may be asked this year to put up $200 million each for that project and the proposed new Kauai jail.

Taken altogether, Johnson is contemplating a huge ask of a Legislature that for many years has been extremely reluctant to fund very large prison and jail projects.

Former Gov. David Ige made his own request for a new Oahu jail the centerpiece of his 2016 State of the State address, but his pitch fell flat. Lawmakers never agreed to fund it, and corrections officials are pursuing a new plan to have a developer finance and build the jail, then lease it to the state.

Meanwhile, the inmate population has outgrown the capacity of the state’s correctional facilities. Hawaii holds about 1,000 prisoners in a privately run prison in Arizona because state prisons have no room for them.

The Legislature was relatively generous with the correctional system this year, and included $94 million in assorted prison and jail maintenance projects in the current state budget.

But Johnson’s requests for gobs of additional construction money next year may not be well received by lawmakers, who have plenty of other projects to fund.

“We are competing with schools, the need for new highways, community infrastructure, roads, hospitals, but at the same time corrections is a necessary evil that we have to maintain,” Johnson said.

“I have no problem telling truth to power on what’s needed,” Johnson said. “What I get out of that is maybe something different, but at this point I’ll take whatever I can get to at least keep the system limping along until we can do something. But we can only limp along for so long.”

“The people out there who say don’t build anything, don’t build anything — they don’t realize the conditions that people have to live in and our staff have to work in,” Johnson said.

And Johnson warned there is a steep price to be paid if the state continues to delay fixing the system. Each year the state delays construction of the new Oahu jail adds some $50 million to $80 million in construction escalation costs to that project alone, he said.

“I want to make clear if we don’t get a replacement for OCCC sometime in the near future, then we are just setting ourselves up for DOJ intervention,” he said, referring to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii asked DOJ to investigate and intervene in allegedly unconstitutional conditions in the overcrowded Hawaii correctional system in 2017, but it is unclear if the federal government ever took any action on that request.

If the federal government were to intervene in the Hawaii correctional system to force the state to correct unconstitutional conditions, the state could then be forced to spend the money necessary to fix the system.

Johnson can expect to encounter some determined resistance to his funding requests from the ACLU and others when the Legislature reconvenes in January.

Liam Chinn, coordinator of the Reimagining Public Safety in Hawaii Coalition, agrees that state correctional facilities need to be maintained. But, he said, Johnson’s jail plans run counter to commitments made by lawmakers to significantly reduce Hawaii’s jail population.

Chinn cited data that suggests some 40% of Hawaii jail inmates are homeless.

“I have heard multiple state leaders say that putting the homeless in jail is the most expensive, least effective option,” he said.

“We currently have the twin crises of a housing shortage and a public health crisis — especially mental health — and both of these areas are massively under-resourced, and the most effective way to create community safety is significant investments in public health and affordable housing,” Chinn said.

The coalition is calling for a moratorium on further planning of proposed jails, and wants a forensic audit of all spending on proposed jail expansion projects, Chinn said.

The state has committed more than $24 million to planning the new Oahu jail so far, including money to develop a request for proposals to select a developer for the project. The solicitation for that project is expected to be released next year.

Chinn contends that the estimated $1 billion the new jail will cost “should be going toward permanent supportive housing, and that itself will dramatically reduce the need for jail beds.”

The coalition includes Common Cause Hawaii, the ACLU and the Hawaii Health & Harm Reduction Center.

Johnson told the Hawaii Correctional System Oversight Commission last week he will meet with the governor and others in early October to discuss which of the department’s requests will be included in the proposed budget that Green will submit to the Legislature in December.

House Corrections, Military and Veterans Committee Chairman Mark Hashem and Senate Public Safety and Intergovernmental and Military Affairs Chairman Glenn Wakai did not respond to a request for comment on Johnson’s spending proposals.

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This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.