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Last Friday, a state House-Senate conference committee concluded its negotiations on three bills dealing with the holding and release of prisoners. All three had the support of leading local criminologists and advocates for prison reform in Hawaii, and all three went down to defeat to little or no fanfare.

Perhaps that’s no great surprise, at first glance. In a severe economic downturn and on the heels of a sensational murder in Chinatown last month, citizens shouldn’t be expected to show up at the Legislature with pitchforks demanding correctional reform. It’s a movement easily caricatured as “soft on crime,” especially in a state not far removed from community-wide panic over crystal methamphetamine in the early part of this decade.

Academics and others, however, say that citizens—including the get-tough-on-crime constituency—should be paying attention to Hawaii’s corrections process, one many say fails to deliver on its promises and costs too much money along the way.

“We continue to expand imprisonment in the face of declining crime,” says Meda Chesney-Lind, Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a former Vice President of the American Society of Criminology. “We have a crime rate as low as it was in 1975. In those years, Hawaii had hundreds of people in prison. Today, we have thousands.”

Indeed, while the overall Hawaii violent crime rate maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation stood mildly higher in 2007 (281) than in the mid-1970s (218), it does not seem to explain the increase in our incarceration rate, which is increasing much more rapidly than the national average. With violent crime rates that seem to plummet farther every year—only once in nearly 50 years of FBI statistics has the murder rate in Hawaii been lower than it was last year—it’s no wonder an investigation by Congressional Quarterly ranked Honolulu the safest city in the United States with a population greater than 500,000. Yet between 2000 and 2006, Hawaii’s incarceration rate grew by 4 percent, compared to 1.6 percent nationally.

One might suspect that all this locking-up of offenders is behind the drop in violent crime, but the evidence suggests that violent crime has been dropping for many years across the U.S. Hawaii, like many other states but at a much higher rate and, some say, much less responsibly, is locking up people for drug addiction.

“Here we have an economic crisis,” Chesney-Lind says, “we’re slashing education and other programs, and yet not a word about slashing something that we already know is not an effective response to drug use. While other states, including some with Republican governors, are rethinking the criminalization of drug addiction, we are incarcerating more and more people for failing drug tests.”

Senate Bill 540, which sought to implement a Federal reentry program for drug offenders nearing release, was one of the bills that failed to emerge from the conference committee last week. The program, known as Phase Two of the Residential Drug Abuse Program, was the reentry piece, which would have provided a system by which inmates at Oahu Community Correctional Center could find jobs in the community and continue to “reside” in the prison for six months while they gained experience and received counseling to ease reentry into society. Federal Bureau of Prisons statistics show that inmates who participate in RDAP programs are 73 percent less likely to re-offend than those who do not, and reform advocates like Kat Brady say Phase Two is the critical element.

“All the research shows the value of a six-month half-step,” Brady says. “When you reduce recidivism, you’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing: providing more public safety. The analogy I make is: go to the schoolyard when the kids are released for recess. They’re wild because they’ve been cooped up, they go “Waaaaaaah!’ We don’t need people coming out of prison going, ‘waaaaaaah!’”

Police and corrections officials testified in opposition to SB 540, citing financial concerns related to the development of reentry programs. Chesney-Lind says that misses the point. She draws the connection to other budget cuts and wonders whether the public—or officials—are making the right connections. “We’re talking about cuts of between $22 and $34 million at the university, but the public doesn’t connect the dots between their kids higher tuition and the rate of imprisonment. We’re literally shoving money out the door. In a crisis, it’s a no-brainer to do smarter things instead of things we already know don’t work.”

Outsourcing imprisonment

One of those things, according to Chesney-Lind and Brady is the shipping of prisoners to the mainland. “We started doing it as a temporary measure in 1995, when we sent 300 prisoners to Texas,” Brady says. “Fourteen years later, this temporary thing has grown to over 2,000 in private prisons on the continent.”

This practice was the subject of another failed bill this legislative session, House Bill 519, which would have begun the process of returning inmates to Hawaii by mandating that no more than 500 could be held in mainland prisons by the end of 2015.

“What this does is, it’s saying that we can banish people, and the community doesn’t have to deal with the consequences,” says Brady. “But it turns out 95 percent of them do come back. We all know that the best way to reintegrate into society is to [serve your sentence in the community] yet we’re sending our prisoners to places where people have no idea who they are. The Sonoran Desert—I can’t think of a more foreign place to send Hawaiians,” who constitute roughly 40 percent of Hawaii’s total inmate population.

University of Hawaii at Hilo sociologist Marilyn Brown, in testimony provided to the House Committee on Public Safety and Military Affairs before the opening of the current legislative session, addressed the overrepresentation of Native Hawaiians among Hawai’i’s incarcerated. She suggests that the lack of adequate transitional and social services in their communities virtually guarantees that Native Hawaiians will reenter the prison system. “[The data] suggest that low income communities [such as Waianae, where 25 percent of Native Hawaiians released from prison relocate] are hard-pressed to provide the level of services, job opportunities and drug and mental health treatment that those released from prison require,” Brown wrote. “Absent these services [Hawaiians] are simply returned to prison, often through the back door of parole revocation.”

And once they are back in the system, Native Hawaiians are increasingly likely to find themselves imprisoned on the mainland, thousands of miles from family and loved ones, increasing stress and, ultimately and especially without adequate reentry programs, beginning the cycle all over again. Brown points to the Department of Public Safety showing that two-thirds of Native Hawaiians in prison are repeat offenders.

Get smart

The failure of progressive legislation this year has disappointed advocates of corrections reform, but they promise to keep fighting. “It’s hard to compete with men wearing uniforms and carrying guns,” Chesney-Lind says of the way law enforcement and corrections officials lined up this year in opposition to reform.

Ultimately, it’s not the law enforcement community Chesney-Lind blames. “Peter [Carlisle, the Honolulu prosecutor] is doing his job, which is to lock people up. But where is the Public Defender’s office, where’s Legal Aid, where is the ACLU on these issues? We need some political leadership. In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is telling his prison system to reduce its size. This is no longer a case where you need to be politically brave. But I hear nothing from the governor, and now, nothing from the Legislature either.”

“We’re being dumb on crime and we need to be smart on crime. We need a better approach.”

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