A roughly decade-old effort to replace Oahu’s obsolete and overcrowded jail has bogged down at the Legislature.
Hawaii’s 50-member House of Representatives recently passed a state budget draft that rejects a request from Gov. David Ige to allocate $15 million for continued planning and procurement work to build a new Oahu Community Correctional Center in Halawa.
Replacing the 47-year-old OCCC in Kalihi, parts of which date back to 1912, with a modern facility had drawn predominant past support from lawmakers, who appropriated an initial $5 million in 2014 followed by $5.4 million in 2016 to fund such items as site analyses and selection, a master plan, community outreach, an environmental impact statement and a request for private developers to convey interest in largely financing and delivering such a project for state use.
Ige in January requested $15 million more to develop a detailed request for proposals, select a winning bid and negotiate a development agreement, among other things.
But on March 10 the House Finance Committee voted to advance the state’s supplemental budget bill with no funding for the new OCCC project. Six days later all House lawmakers voted unanimously to send their budget bill to the Senate for consideration.
“We are proud to say that the Finance Committee, along with the House, did not fund the $15 million request for the construction of the new OCCC,” Sylvia Luke, committee chair, said during a March 16 floor speech.
The move led by Luke, who is running for lieutenant governor, embraces pushback from criminal justice system reform advocates who contend that new policies and programs need to be developed that keep people from being in jail so that a larger facility isn’t needed.
“Criminal justice reform continues to be a priority for the House,” Luke said in her speech.
State Department of Public Safety officials say they support such reform efforts but also stress that waiting for the Legislature, law enforcement, prosecutors and judges to alter incarceration rates through actions will only extend poor conditions at OCCC and lead to a higher future cost, even for a potentially smaller new jail.
The department also has said the plan for a new OCCC could be adjusted to accommodate a smaller future projected jail population.
OCCC was built to house short-term inmates and has 982 beds. It is used to hold people awaiting trial or sentencing on Oahu for misdemeanor crimes as well as convicted people with no more than two years or so left on their sentences.
The envisioned new jail, which DPS is pursuing with help from private consultants and the state Department of Accounting and General Services, would have 1,012 detention beds and 393 pre-release beds for a total of 1,405 beds representing a 43% larger facility than the current one.
Some critics call the proposed new jail an excessive and too costly facility that perpetuates an overly punitive criminal justice system.
“This is not the jail that the people of Hawaii want or need,” said Bob Merce, a retired lawyer who was vice chair of a prison reform task force that was formed by the Legislature and opposes the plan for a new OCCC, at the Finance Committee’s budget bill hearing. “It’s too big, it’s too expensive and it’s been poorly planned.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii also testified against the project funding.
“We ask that we invest in proven strategies for de-carceration and alternatives to incarceration,” Carrie Ann Shirota, the organization’s policy director, told the committee.
One entity playing a major role in trying to stop the current OCCC replacement plan is a commission that lawmakers created two years ago to initiate reform in Hawaii’s correctional system.
The Hawaii Correctional Systems Oversight Commission took a position in late 2020 that planing for a new jail should be paused, and reiterated its position in a January letter sent to the House Finance Committee and the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
“We find a replacement facility is much needed but disagree with the size and scope of the new facility,” the letter said. “We are concerned that the planned facility will be significantly larger and cost far more than is necessary, and that it will perpetuate a punitive model of our criminal justice system.”
The commission said its call for a pause was bolstered by a 32-page report produced by Merce and presented to the commission in December.
Merce’s report, which the commission called compelling, noted that other cities have found ways to reduce jail populations and said state planners should have examined such policies and practices as part of their work.
Merce’s report also questions how much it will cost to carry out the state’s plan. State officials estimated in 2017 that the project would cost $525 million, though Merce wrote that the figure is probably closer to $1 billion, in part because a new prison in Utah is being finished at roughly that price after it broke ground in 2017 with an estimated $550 million cost.
“There is a right way and a wrong way to plan a new jail, and unfortunately, Hawaii chose the wrong way,” the report said.
DPS continues to advocate for the replacement plan, warning that starting over could add a decade or more to the timetable for replacing OCCC, and at a bigger expense.
“Even a smaller, scaled down build will end up costing the state more money as long as delays continue to bog down the process,” DPS spokeswoman Toni Schwartz said Monday in a statement. “The department must move forward with this redevelopment project to avoid added costs due to delays.”
Max Otani, the agency’s director, shared this concern with the House Committee on Corrections, Military and Veterans at a February hearing on a bill aimed at pausing development of a new jail on Oahu.
“The planning process for this new facility is almost complete,” he told the committee. “Any halt to the process will likely result in the restart of the program. Even a pause of a year will likely result in a reset of the program and likely another decade or more before a new jail can be completed with a much higher construction cost.”
Maintaining OCCC where it is along Dillingham Boulevard and Puuhale Road near a planned city rail station also would eliminate an opportunity to redevelop the 16-acre Kalihi site with transit-oriented uses.
Merce supported the measure to pause planning, House Bill 2516, as did others including the ACLU, which advocated for a five-year moratorium on replacing OCCC.
“Building new jails and prisons is not the solution to overcrowding in Hawaii,” the ACLU’s Shirota said at the hearing.
A couple of committee members, Reps. Sonny Ganaden (D, Sand Island-Kalihi-Airport) and Sam Kong (D, Halawa-Aiea-Newtown), expressed concern over a pause as the committee voted to amend the bill so that no pause would take place if the commission was given a partnership role in the OCCC replacement project.
“If we don’t move forward and we wait some years — wow, I just feel sorry for all those who are incarcerated,” said Kong, who voted with reservations to advance the amended bill. “How much more planning do we actually need?”
After the committee’s Feb. 9 vote, HB 2516 stalled because the House Judiciary Committee declined to hear the bill.
The Senate has scheduled a public hearing on the budget bill, House Bill 1600, for April 5.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly said OCCC was designed for long-term incarceration.
