hunterbishop.com

Good discussion in the comments on prisons, and I found the citation James Weatherford asked for regarding the state's assurances that violent offenders would not be housed at Kulani Correctional Facility.

In a story published by the Hawaii Tribune-Herald on Dec. 22, 1989 (no link, but you could  look it up at the public library), I wrote:

“State officials made public assurances that violent criminals like Rudy Sadino would no longer be held at Kulani after a major shakedown in 1984 at the remote 10,000-acre facility on the slopes of Mauna Loa.” (Sadino is the “Crisco Kid” referred to by Hugh Clark.) The story went on the describe the numerous violent criminals housed at Kulani, including an inmate who beat a woman to death with a baseball bat yet played on the  traveling prison softball team.

In 1985, corrections assistant administrator Ted Sakai said “corrections officials were following through on pledges that violent criminals would not be assigned to Kulani. Four years later, a special master for state prisons appointed by then-Gov. John Waihee “promised major reforms … , including the transfer of prisoners ‘of questionable risk’ out of Kulani.”

But in line with the repeated empty assurances, Sakai also said there were “no firm rules” about where inmates would be placed in the system, and that an inmate’s behavior “while they’re with us” would be the determining factor in where an inmate is placed. The article even revealed that prison officials lied about Sadino’s poor behavior behind bars in order to transfer him from an Oahu prison to the minimum-security facility at Kulani.

In the end little about the state's prison policies changed.  All that talk was mostly lip service as violent offenders still made their way to Kulani often to ease crowding at Oahu prisons. And eventually the state’s largest sexual offender treatment program also was established at Kulani and still exists there.

Aaron Stene wrote that " locking up these creeps will require more prison space to be built and/or more of our tax dollars will be flowing to private prison prison companies on the mainland."

But what’s the problem with paying mainland companies to house violent criminals at half the cost of keeping them here when we get a service -- taking them out of circulation -- that is of overall benefit to the community? And why not save the exorbitant costs of builiding new prisons in Hawaii and spend that money instead on more productive projects like, for example, improving schools?

And if indeed we have "the moral issue of Hawaii taking care of its own problems," as Wankine suggests -- although I'm not sure why sending inmates to the mainland is immoral -- I rather like Rene Siracusa’s idea for an off-shore, floating hoosegow. Maybe that should be explored again.

Finally, Goyo makes an excellent point. Violent tendencies, not personal failures, should be the primary factor in locking people up.