Posted on: Friday, June 3, 2005

EDITORIAL
State must avoid future prison lawsuits

Given that it was the state's shortcomings that allowed prison inmates to remain behind bars beyond their sentence term, it's good that corrections officials have moved to resolve this injustice with admirable speed.

Part of a settlement approved this week by U.S. Magistrate Leslie Kobayashi orders the state to pay up to $1.2 million to possibly hundreds of prisoners kept too long in prison.

But the most crucial element for the long term is the requirement that the state make procedural reforms to keep such problems from happening again.

Last year, lawmakers set up a new corrections division, the Offender Management Office, headed since October by Tom Read, an attorney with years of experience litigating cases of sentence errors.

By January, he and his staff had crafted a policy that clarified the way that an inmate's term should be computed — a calculation that's complicated in many cases by multiple sentences and additional years tacked on.

There's still work to do, with the need for additional staff training and closer alignment of language used by the various courts to express the judge's intent.

Corrections is required to perform its own internal audit of the process every year to ensure that inmates serve their proper time, and no more. But it's also incumbent on lawmakers to check back with the department for a progress report.

Hawai'i doesn't need any more of prisoners kept past their time, or another expensive settlement.