Posted on: Monday, January 14, 2002

EDITORIAL
Better ways to spend money than on prisons

This time last year we were congratulating Gov. Ben Cayetano for recognizing that there are better ways to spend the state's money than constructing a major new state prison in Hawai'i.

That was last year. This year Cayetano is back asking not for one but for two prisons: one a larger replacement for the bursting-at-seams O'ahu Community Correctional Center in Kalihi, and the other a treatment facility on the Big Island.

Don't hold your breath. Why should the state, having been frustrated by a decade-long search for an acceptable site for one prison, now instantly succeed in finding two sites?

Making the challenge even greater is the fact that Cayetano wants to put one of them on O'ahu, near enough to highways for easy transportation to the court buildings downtown, and the other on the Big Island.

O'ahu residents deeply resent having any facility with a negative connotation located in their back yards — garbage dump, parole office, or the like. True enough, OCCC has outgrown its Kalihi site, which is squeezed by development and residential neighborhoods.

But good luck in finding another O'ahu site.

And Big Island residents have tended to be negative even about developments that might be good for them. Certainly the prospect of new jobs has not been enough to get them to welcome a prison.

More important than this practical objection to Cayetano's request is a philosophical one. Nearly all inmates sooner or later are returned to the community, the product of having been "warehoused" for years with little rehabilitation or drug treatment. Too many of them come out worse than when they went in.

Far more needed, we think — not to mention more likely to come about — are modest programs for halfway houses and expansion of existing facilities and additional short-term leases or rental of bed spaces. Some space has opened up for state prisoners, for instance, in the new federal detention facility near Honolulu Airport.

But what is most vital is to continue to expand drug treatment programs, both within prison and outside.

This is crucial. It is obvious that drugs or substance abuse lies at the root of the problems that bring the majority of people into the justice system. It is ultimately cheaper — as well as more humane — to spend public resources on getting to that root problem rather than simply locking up those who display the symptoms.

Experience suggests that no matter how many new prison bed spaces you build, a way will be found to fill them.

No one suggests that drug treatment is a miracle. The failure rate, at least for those who are less than earnest about trying it, is high. But drug treatment is relatively cheap; the savings from even modest success rates is impressive.

We will always need prisons for the violent or hardened criminals within the system. Prison must also be there as a last option for those who refuse to cooperate with treatment efforts.

But a commitment of state energy and money into intensive, supervised drug treatment (such as is seen with the successful Drug Court program) is a far more sensible approach than the thought that we can ever jail our way out of our crime problem.