Posted on: Thursday, August 28, 2003

EDITORIAL
Youth facility abuses shameful to Hawai'i

We've long been baffled by the fact that the greatest failings of government in Hawai'i, a state ordinarily considered progressive, often seem to involve those people most powerlessly dependent upon it: prisoners, mental patients, foster children, special-education students.

The latest in a long series of horror stories comes to us from Kailua, in a report by the American Civil Liberties Union alleging a host of abuses against youths confined in the Hawai'i Youth Correctional Facility. Separated by Kalaniana'ole Highway, the HYCF houses about 70 boys and 20 girls in separate facilities.

The report speaks of "unduly punitive" and badly crowded living conditions in a "general atmosphere of fear" because of "persistently used excessive physical force." One guard is described as seeming to "delight in using violence," another as one of the "most violent and abusive," having slammed a boy's head into a concrete bed and punched him.

There is at least one allegation of rape and much talk of threats of rape.

We understand that these are, at this point, simply allegations, although they are substantive enough for the Lingle administration to have taken immediate action.

But the point is that such conditions — "a pattern of egregious conduct and conditions at HYCF that violate minimum professional and constitutional standards," according to the report — are simply unacceptable in any 21st-century penal institution anywhere.

That these are youth facilities in the Aloha State makes it doubly disgraceful.

To her credit, Gov. Linda Lingle seems to have taken this problem, one that she appears to have inherited, seriously. The governor promptly reassigned the administrator and a corrections official pending a state criminal investigation, saying the "report's conclusions are too serious to leave the current management in place."

We're intrigued by two aspects of this troubling case: first, a high degree of cooperation between the Lingle administration and the ACLU, an organization that conservatives often love to revile; and second, a preliminary investigation by the attorney general's office of the ACLU's initial complaints that appeared to turn up no major problems.

Still, we give Attorney General Mark Bennett credit for allowing the ACLU to persevere with its own on-site investigation leading to the damning report.

Whatever specifics eventually emerge, the community owes the ACLU, whose interest in HYCF began with a letter smuggled out by a guard, a debt of gratitude for shining a bright light into what may turn out to be a dark pocket of public shame.