Inmates mill aimlessly around the “fishbowl” Wednesday before being ordered to get on their mattresses and face the wall.
Inmates mill aimlessly around the “fishbowl” Wednesday before being ordered to get on their mattresses and face the wall.
The roughly 40-by-40-foot enclosure behind smoked glass serves as an overflow area for the crowded Hawaii Community Correctional Center. The inmates are facing the wall to protect their privacy during a media tour.
Inmates might spend a day or two, or more, bunking down on the mattresses on the concrete floor. As soon as cell space becomes available, they will be transferred to a 10-by-7-foot cell that they’ll share with one or two other inmates.
“This is the backflow,” said Warden Peter Cabreros.
While the state Legislature focuses on an estimated $650 million jail for Oahu, community correctional facilities on the neighbor islands are far more crowded.
HCCC and Maui Community Correctional Center are the two most overcapacity, taking turns being the most crowded when weekly counts are published, Public Safety officials say.
Oahu Community Correctional Center, with an operational bed capacity of 954, had a Jan. 23 population of 1,102, or 15.5 percent overcapacity. HCCC, while having an operational bed capacity of 226, had a population of 342, or 51.3 percent overcapacity.
Operational bed capacity is a more generous measure of capacity created after certain modifications were made to the original design. HCCC’s design capacity is 206 beds.
A joint session of the House Committee on Public Safety and the Senate Committee on Public Safety, Intergovernmental and Military Affairs is scheduled to convene at 10 a.m. today to discuss the progress on the replacement of OCCC.
Meanwhile, $15 million appropriated by the Legislature last year to expand HCCC is still working its way through the Gov. David Ige administration.
“The funding request is being processed by the departments and hasn’t yet reached the governor’s desk,” spokeswoman Cindy McMillan said.
And it has a few hurdles to clear before it does.
“The Department of Public Safety has completed our request to the Department of Accounting and General Services to get the money released. After DAGS completes their portion, it will then go through Budget and Finance and then on to the governor,” Public Safety Department spokeswoman Toni Schwartz explained Wednesday.
State Rep. Joy San Buenaventura, D-Puna, said she’d like to see last year’s money released. In addition, she wants a facility constructed in Kailua-Kona, where the Judiciary has 10 acres and a new courthouse under construction.
“Hilo shouldn’t have to house the entire Big Island population,” San Buenaventura said Tuesday.
She said driving pretrial detainees from Hilo to court in Kailua-Kona adds to the overtime costs for correctional officers who must ferry inmates to and from court hearings in West Hawaii. Having to drive to Hilo also is a burden on West Hawaii families — most of them low-income — who want to visit incarcerated family members.
Cabreros estimated each trip to the Kona courthouse costs four to six hours in overtime per officer, in addition to gas and vehicle wear and tear. The department recently received a new 15-passenger van, which cuts down somewhat on the cost.
HCCC holds a mixture of pretrial detainees and sentenced misdemeanants and felons.
Crowded and what it calls unsanitary conditions in most of Hawaii’s prisons and jails led the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii to file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice requesting a federal investigation.
“Hawaii policymakers have long been warned that without a long-term plan to manage the growth of incarceration, the state could revert to conditions that led to class-action lawsuits and federal oversight,” ACLU Legal Director Mateo Caballero said in a Jan. 10 statement.
ACLU staff could not be reached for an update Wednesday.
The ACLU sued the state in 1984, which led to a 1989 federal consent decree overseeing Hawaii’s jails and prisons. By 1996, the state and the ACLU agreed that the state was in compliance with the federal decree and the court order was dropped three years later.
HCCC is looking into triple-decker bunk beds to at least get that third inmate in the cell off the floor and onto a bed.
Despite the crowds of inmates, corrections officers at HCCC manage a variety of education and personal development programs for inmates, from high school equivalency and trade skills to anger management and problem-solving skills.
A well-stocked library offers orderly shelves of law books, and less-organized but well-thumbed stacks of paperback novels.
Activity time for inmates, when they’re often out of those crowded cells, stretches from 5 a.m.-10 p.m.
Email Nancy Cook Lauer at ncook-lauer@westhawaiitoday.