Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 25, Number 6, 1 Mei 2008 — Overcrowded prisons [ARTICLE]

Overcrowded prisons

As our islands' jails and state prisons popuMon explodes, our state is spending $50 million-plus annually on mainland private prison beds and hundreds of thousands more on federal detention center bed rentals. It should be obvious by now that more prison bed space is not the answer. In fact, proposed new prisons and tent cities to house more imnates here at home are not a solution but a perpetuation of the problem. Rehabilitation vs. punishment aside, we have far too many of our state's populahon in prison. Our state leaders and lawmakers need to identify the problem areas that feed our criminal justice system as well as those that restrict and delay the flow of detainees through the system. One eomplieahon in the rehabilitation of our state's criminal justice system is that there are several separate govermnent agencies at work and none of them seem to be on the same page. The most qualified and frustrated players in the game are our state judges. One-size-fits-all mandatory

sentencing and the repeat offender statute prevent sentencing discretion and forces lengthy prison tenns upon the oftentimes undeserving. This statute when apphed to the nonviolent addict trumps drug court, mental heahh court and the state's HOPE, or Hawai'i's Opportunity Probation with Enforcement, program. A five-year tenn is the mandatory sentence. There is no easy answer to our criminal justice systenfs dilemma. We cannot set dangerous criminals free and we should not build moie prisons. We should, however, return sentencing authority to the courts, rethinkprosecutorial wildcard statutes, we must adequately provide pretrial altematives to jail and we should provide rehabilitative programming during pretrial incarcerations. We must expand in-prison treatment for those unsafe to release, and when safe to do so utilize outside prison programs and treatment centers. We should also inunediately empower dmg court, mental heahh court and hope probation to override the repeat offender statute in the case of the nonviolent minor drug possessing addict. Miehael Spiker lnmate/addict O'ahu (ommunity Corrections Center Honolulu