Editorial
Don't expect church on Puuhale Road

The idea is a non-starter, of course, at least for the foreseeable future. Talk of a church exploring the purchase of the site of O'ahu Community Correctional Center in Kalihi is for the foreseeable future just that — talk.

Leaders of the New Hope Christian Fellowship surely must have come away from preliminary discussions with the governor and other state officials with that impression.

The immediate reason is that the state has no place else to house the 1,100-plus inmates now incarcerated at OCCC. The existing prison facilities remain so overcrowded that the state is still at risk for being returned to federal court supervision. Abysmal conditions at OCCC that led to a successful American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit in 1984 have been greatly improved, however.

Further, OCCC today is used for pretrial detention, which makes direct removal of the facility to a Neighbor Island, far from the O'ahu courts that try the vast majority of cases, impossible.

But for further down the road, there are good reasons to contemplate something different for the Puuhale Road and Dillingham Boulevard site:

• OCCC is an obsolete facility, built in 1917 for 300 and expanded over the years. It "leaks" badly — that is, escapes by dangerous prisoners are all too commonplace. And it's arguable that triple bunking in this aging facility is becoming cruel and unusual, in the constitutional sense.

• Kalihi, which was practically "country" when the facility was built, is now a densely crowded urban area with homes, five schools and even a blood bank nearby. No one would contemplate locating a prison there now.

• Kalihi complains, with reason, that it has been picked on for too many of the facilities that other neighborhoods reject. "Kalihi" over the years has too often been synonymous with "not in my back yard."

It's unlikely, but not inconceivable, that some day a comprehensive, state-of-the art prison might be built, probably on the Big Island, which could free up part of the Halawa Community Correctional Center for pretrial detention and allow the redevelopment of the OCCC site.

The unrelievedly gray concrete of Halawa is — at least in Hawai'i terms — really too stern for long-term confinement. One would hope a new prison would show more aloha.

But for now, it's far from clear that Hawai'i even needs a new prison. First the state should experiment with reduction of prison populations with sentencing alternatives for nonviolent drug offenders and others.

If the day comes when the OCCC site is freed for other uses, some caveats must apply:

• The state must realize something in exchange for the now considerable value of this land.

• Kalihi residents must be satisfied with the new use, and it should go a long way toward revitalizing and upgrading the neighborhood. A church-sponsored community center is one possibility, but so too is a park.

All that said, however, we continue to caution you not to hold your breath.