A recent editorial described the ACLU of Hawaii’s objections to building a new jail as understandable hesitancy as broader reform proposals are still languishing (“New jail should be part of reform,” Our View, April 4). It then proceeded to argue that a new jail should be built anyway. Doing this, however, would give policymakers a pass from making critical reforms, would be a waste of $1 billion in taxpayer money, and ultimately won’t work.
A new and larger jail would simply be filled with more people until it, too, is overcrowded. We know this because it is what happens everywhere — including here — when building a new jail is given precedence over transforming the criminal legal system from a punitive model to a rehabilitative one. Indeed, as the editorial noted, the ACLU filed suit due to overcrowding nine years after the Oahu Community Correctional Center (OCCC) was first built.
Imagine a local community hospital that is designed to hold up to 1,000 patients on an in-patient basis. At any given time, however, the hospital actually houses 2,000 patients. This stretches the hospital’s resources and endangers the well-being of everyone inside. An overcrowded hospital means people are more likely to get sick, the facilities are more difficult to keep up, and the staff are more likely to burn out. So, a proposal is made to build a new hospital, which will be designed to house 2,000 patients.
Sounds reasonable, right? Would it still sound reasonable, though, when you learn that of the 2,000 people currently housed at the hospital, less than half of them have actually been determined by a doctor to need hospitalization? The majority have only been referred to the hospital for testing to determine if they need to be hospitalized. But pending their test results, wealthy patients are allowed to wait at home for a decision while poor patients are legally required to stay at the hospital.
That doesn’t sound fair or reasonable, does it? And yet, this analogy mirrors the situation we’re currently facing with OCCC where — as of March 28 — about 56% of the people who are incarcerated have not been convicted of a crime and are only there because they cannot afford bail to be at home while they await trial.
Another 34% of people who are incarcerated at OCCC are there for probation violations, the vast majority of which are “technical violations,” like spending time with a loved one with a conviction on their record, relapse related to drug use, or showing up late for an appointment with a parole or probation officer. Not committing a new crime.
In other words, about 90% of people incarcerated at OCCC right now are not actually incarcerated as a result of being convicted of a crime. This is a primary driver of jail overcrowding. Just imagine if 90% of the patients at Queen’s Hospital did not actually have to be hospitalized, were forced to stay there anyway, and then taxpayers were asked to pay $1 billion to build a bigger hospital to alleviate the overcrowding. It would make no sense and the community would be infuriated. Better to spend that $1 billion on improving access to preventive health care so people wouldn’t be referred to the hospital in the first place.
House Finance Chairwoman Sylvia Luke was right about OCCC when she said, “Basically, you’re putting people in jail because they’re poor. We’re actually housing indigent individuals who have not been convicted, and because of that we need to right size the prison population before they commit to a prison, and that’s been my criticism, and we’re far from that.”
Reforms must come first.
