Posted on: Tuesday, October 2, 2001

More Hawai'i inmates being moved to Mainland

By Kevin Dayton
Advertiser Capitol Bureau Chief

About 50 more Hawai'i prisoners will be shipped to the Mainland in the next few days, bringing the total number of Hawai'i convicts serving time on the Mainland to about 1,250.

Ted Sakai, director of the state Department of Public Safety, said the inmate movement is part of a series of shifts of prisoners to allow a contractor to install fire sprinklers at the Halawa High Security Facility.

Later this month, inmates will be removed from one of the three modules at Halawa and will be placed elsewhere at the high-security facility or at the medium-security facility next door.

The contractor will install sprinklers in each of the prison's three modules in sequence as part of the $485,000 project, Sakai said.

Hawai'i contracts with two private prison operators to house male and female inmates in Arizona and Oklahoma.

Sakai also said about 40 male prisoners temporarily placed in the Torrance County Detention Center in Estancia, N.M., have been moved to other prisons.

The inmates were sent to Estancia in an effort to break up alleged prison gang activity at the Florence Correctional Center in Florence, Ariz.