As director of the Research and Evaluation in Public Safety (REPS) program at the University of Hawaii (from 2017 to 2019), I put together a comprehensive 100-page report with some honest and objective recommendations about how to resolve some serious deficiencies and improve our corrections systems. This report provides a blueprint for actions the Department of Public Safety (DPS) must take if it truly wants to serve public safety. Thus, I present the following summary with key excerpts.

First and foremost is the toxic, authoritarian, hierarchical and punitive corrections culture that must change from the top down. DPS needs visionary leadership that embodies the clear and convincing top-down commitment to corrections reform through consistent communication and actions. This starts with inclusive development, enhancement and promulgation of the agency’s strategic plan, mission, vision, leadership style and collaborative efforts. This can only take place by a direct, hands-on approach to intra-agency coordination, collaboration and communication within DPS, which is currently seriously lacking.

Secondly, DPS must move away from the traditional retributive, security-focused correctional culture to one that views incarceration as an opportunity to maximize potential and promote positive change while balancing security needs.

A key here is the need for widespread adoption of a rehabilitation orientation throughout DPS — one that embodies the belief that every interaction is an opportunity to enhance inmate motivation, recovery, rehabilitation and community reintegration.

Third, DPS must improve its data management and accountability but doing so at the cost of an expensive information technology (IT) overhaul is a luxury that DPS can ill afford at this time, given the serious and urgent nature of its data problems (which actually don’t require an expensive new IT system). The most glaring of these issues include the inability to correctly calculate maximum release dates for thousands of past and present inmates — which could be fixed with available software programming for about $50,000 — and the apparent overall increase in risk levels of inmates during incarceration, which often is the result of not appropriately separating low- from higher-risk inmates.

Fourth, DPS is failing to address inmates’ criminogenic needs — i.e., parenting/family relationships, education/employment, substance abuse, leisure/recreation, peer relationships, emotional stability/mental health, criminal orientation and thinking, and residential stability — sufficiently during incarceration. There are proven-effective curricula ready and waiting for adoption, yet DPS has yet to take advantage of a federally-funded opportunity to train a cadre of employees on the Thinking for Change program, which would help them better address criminogenic needs of inmates. Thus inmates are being deprived of the very programming needed for their successful rehabilitation.

Finally, it is crucial to note that Hawaii has the second-lowest per capita spending for corrections in the country; also, Hawaii has the lowest percentage of total criminal justice spending allotted to corrections in the entire country.

In conclusion, it’s quite simple. If we continue to underfund it and underutilize it, our corrections system will continue to undermine public safety. The public needs to understand that incarceration does not work. Period. We need to be reminded as a society that we support incarceration as punishment not for punishment and that ineffective and punitive corrections systems, like the one we have, which don’t provide sufficient rehabilitation opportunities to inmates, actually increase, not decrease, the risk to the public.

The recently legislated Corrections Oversight Commission is a step in the right direction but without additional funding, public support and visionary leadership that embraces prison and re-entry reform, we will remain mired in this expensive failure of a system that takes offenders and turns them into hardened criminals before putting them right back on the streets and in our communities.

Psychologist consultant Edward Suarez, Ph.D., was director of the now-defunct Research and Evaluation in Public Safety (REPS) at the University of Hawaii Social Science Research Institute.