Criminal Justice
Hawai‘i can no longer afford, financially or socially, to continue shipping its inmates to out-of-state private prisons. In 2005, we spent $36 million to house 1,828 inmates, nearly half the state’s prison population, in privately operated prisons in Oklahoma, Mississippi, Arizona, and Kentucky. In addition to this crushing burden on Hawai‘i’s taxpayers, sending local people to the mainland destroys families, with children of inmates separated from their mothers and fathers for years. The break-down of families further fuels the prison crisis, since inmates with no visitors are six times more likely to re-enter prison during the first year of parole than those with regular visitors.To bring Hawai‘i’s people home, we need to reverse the trend of ever increasing numbers of inmates entering the prison system:
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Since the greatest increase in Hawai‘i’s overall prison population is for use of ice (crystal methamphetamine), we can make a serious dent in the number of inmates by expanding programs to prevent our children from getting involved with drugs in the first place.
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We need to recognize drug addiction is a disease and must be treated as such. All non-violent drug offenders should be sent to treatment programs, not prison. This approach addresses the root causes of crime, which is reason enough to adopt it. In addition, it is far cheaper than locking up drug users, with even the most expensive treatment program costing less than one-fifth the cost of a prison bed. California, which offers treatment instead of prison to all non-violent adult drug offenders, has saved $2.50 for every dollar spent on treatment, a total of $140.5 million in the first year of the program alone, and another $158.8 million in the second.
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We need to expand social reintegration programs like Maui Economic Opportunity’s BEST (Being Empowered and Safe Together) program, which has successfully worked with the Department of Public Safety and other community agencies to turn felons into law-abiding citizens through education, training, and support. Recent studies have shown participants in the BEST program are three to four times less likely to return to prison, as compared to the average Hawai‘i inmate.