A slam dunk: reducing prison overpopulation

Stop us if you've heard this before: The state's prisons are overcrowded. At the Halawa Correctional Facility and the O'ahu Community Correctional Center, three inmates are often locked up in cells designed for one.

So why should we care? Haven't prisoners forfeited their right to any civil liberties, let alone creature comforts? The prisons cost us an arm and a leg under present conditions. What do they want, a country club?

Of course not. There are three very good reasons why we should reduce our inmate population:

• We'll get sued. Overcrowded prisons amount to what the Constitution calls "cruel and unusual punishment." When a similar suit was filed in 1984, two O'ahu facilities were placed under federal oversight until 1999.

• A recent major study by the Justice Department shows that the rate at which inmates released from state prisons commit new crimes rose from 1983 to 1994, a time when the number of inmates doubled. That suggests that the nation's experiment with building lots more prisons as a deterrent to crime has not worked.

• In order to reduce overcrowding, prisons officials propose early release of those reaching the end of their sentences, inmates who can be deported, those who are in poor health, and drug offenders who might be better off in treatment.

Why wait until the prisons are overcrowded to take these measures? Why not do them all the time, to save taxpayer money, instead of waiting until lawsuits threaten?