We need Smart Justice, not a new half-a-billion dollar jail
Over half a billion dollars are slotted for the construction of a new jail in Hālawa at a time when working families are struggling with record unemployment, the rising cost of living, and a public health emergency that has upended our daily lives. This is money we simply cannot afford to waste, and yet that’s exactly what we are preparing to do with this new jail.
The stated impetus for building the new Oʻahu Community Correctional Center (OCCC) is that the current facility is severely over-crowded, as well as old and out-of-date—and this is true. Currently, cells built for one are occupied by as many as four inmates in some cases. Not only is this inhumane and dangerous, it also violates federal law, opening the state up to lawsuit.
The state’s solution is to build a bigger jail with more beds, thus allowing the same number of inmates to be less crowded. There are a number of problems with this thinking.
First and foremost is the failure to recognize that it is underlying policies within the criminal-legal system that have created the over-crowding situation the state now finds itself in. Let’s be 100 percent clear about this: the situation we are describing here is mass incarceration. Without removing the underlying policies that produced this mass incarceration, more beds and space will only result in more incarcerated individuals at the same rate of crowding.
Second, the process of incarceration itself is wildly expensive—it costs the taxpayers of Hawaiʻi about $54,500 per detainee each year, or $150 per day. Compare this to Washington D.C., which releases 85–90 percent of its pretrial arrestees back into the community and spends a mere $18 a day in supervising costs per individual as a result. Our reliance on mass incarceration is bleeding our state and county budgets of precious funds at a time when we need all the funds we can get to keep our communities and economy above water.
Third, the process of incarceration is ineffective when it comes to reforming individuals who cause harm. Mountains of evidence spanning decades shows that incarceration damages the individuals who go through it. Rates of recidivism—or re-offending after being released—go up the longer a person is behind bars. Incarceration as a policy solution, therefore, does a poor job in its stated goal of keeping our communities safe and free from crime.
Instead of wasting our money on a project that will solve precisely none of the problems it is meant to solve, we should be investing that money in ways that uplift our communities and our people. We should be providing rent and mortgage relief, creating a system of family care, and providing paid sick days to essential workers.
And we should be implementing “Smart Justice” policies that will save the state money in the short term and pay huge dividends to society in the long run. “Smart Justice” is a term for a suite of programs, as well as an overall philosophy of criminal justice, that is based in data and evidence.
The vast majority of people currently behind bars would be better served through social service programs, job training programs, and through community-based healing processes like hoʻoponopono—all of which data shows are cheaper and more effective than incarceration. This is not only good for those individuals who have caused harm, but also good for the community they will be re-entering one day. We should all want fewer people committing crimes and more individuals capable of functioning in society.
Incarceration does not reform people. It doesn’t make them better. It destroys them. Do we want destroyed people returning from their time served, or reformed people?
We need to re-evaluate the policies that have resulted in mass incarceration and, in many cases, replace them with policies that genuinely help people overcome their problems so that they can contribute to society as a whole. While there are many policies within the criminal-legal system that do harm, particularly to communities of color, we could start by using some of that jail money to fund three relatively easy lifts that would nevertheless have a big impact:
Better mental health and drug treatment services that will keep people suffering from mental illness and addiction out of jail and off the streets. According to federal data from 2011 to 2012, more than 40 percent of jail inmates reported having been told by a mental health professional that they had a mental health disorder.
Ending cash bail, which effectively criminalizes poverty while allowing wealthy criminals to buy their way out of jail, and replacing the cash bail system with a risk assessment system that keeps potentially dangerous suspects and flight risks off the street regardless of income, while releasing nonviolent, non-flight risk arrestees.
Expansion of parole and probation programs and other community release and supervision inniatives.
How do we know these reforms will have a big impact in reducing our incarcerated population safely? Because over the summer, to prevent a COVID-19 outbreak in OCCC, the Supreme Court ordered judges to cease implementation of cash bail except for flight risks or public safety risks. At the same time, prosecutors and the police were ordered to stop arresting and charging people for minor offenses like low level drug possession, trespassing or violating park closures—the kinds of crimes that are typically committed by people who would benefit from mental health or drug treatment programs. Finally, the court ordered the community release and supervision of specific nonviolent inmates.
These three policy decisions reduced the population of Hawaiʻi’s statewide incarcerated population by an incredible 38 percent in just over two months. And, as demonstrated in the Lawyers for Equal Justice report “Outbreak,” which analyzes the Supreme Court order and its results, this dramatic decreased in the jailed population came with no appreciable increase in violent crime.
What does this tell us? It tells us that, beyond any shadow of a doubt, we do not need a new OCCC. We can safely and effectively reduce the population of our current OCCC simply by re-implementing the policies ordered by the Supreme Court over the summer. Instead of viewing those policies as necessary public health emergency measures, we should view them as the responsible, intelligent reforms that they are and demand that the legislature codify them when it meets again next year.
These critical reforms are more urgent than ever, but they were needed long before the pandemic. The U.S. incarcerates more people today than any other country on earth. We account for just 4 percent of the world’s total population, but represent 21 percent of the world’s incarcerated population. And yes, the policies of mass incarceration are rooted in systemic racism, built right into the criminal-legal system. There can be no other explanation for the dramatic disparities between racial groups behind bars. To insinuate otherwise is to suggest the inherent inferiority or shortcoming of maligned racial groups—in itself a racist concept.
In Hawaiʻi, rates of Kanaka Maoli over-representation in the criminal-legal system mirror, almost identically, rates of over-representation among Black people on the continent. There simply is no other way to explain this than racist policies creating racist outcomes.
COVID-19 has already changed the way we live and function as a society in ways that would have been unimaginable this time last year. In the case of jails and prisons, it has shown us that we can absolutely do better than what we have now, and we can do so without an expensive new jail. Instead of committing Hawaiʻi to a future of continued mass incarceration, we can invest back into our communities and restore people who do harm to being functioning members of society. Doing so will make us all safer and healthier.
