The state is paying about $3 million a year to hold low-risk prison inmates on the Mainland who meet the requirements for community-based treatment and other programs back in Hawai'i, according to projections by a state consultant.

A report by the Criminal Justice Institute Inc. found the security classification system Hawai'i prison officials use to decide where to house inmates is overestimating the risks the convicts pose, causing the inmates to be held longer than necessary in medium or high security facilities.

That aggravates prison and jail overcrowding in Hawai'i, and increases the cost of renting private prison beds on the Mainland.

The report cites an estimated 150 Mainland inmates who are being held in medium security Mainland prisons, but actually qualify as the lowest risk "community custody" inmates. That means they are eligible to be placed in community programs in Hawai'i to get them ready to return to society.

That group of 150 includes some nonviolent offenders who pose so little risk that they qualify to live on their own while they go through re-entry programs, according to the report.

"The Mainland has a backlog of inmates waiting for re-entry," said Camille Graham Camp, co-president of Criminal Justice Institute. "They're not back here. They're not getting re-integrated to get ready to go back to their homes. ... I think we need to re-integrate these people back into the Islands before they go right back into the community, free."

Camp said the Criminal Justice Institute findings show a need for more re-entry beds, which can take the form of residential treatment programs or halfway houses for inmates ready to leave the system. The consultants said the report is generally good news for the state since community beds are cheaper to provide than new prison cells.

Hawai'i pays more than $50 million a year to house more than 2,000 state prison inmates in privately run correctional facilities on the Mainland because there is no room for them in Hawai'i prisons. The inmates are housed in Arizona and Kentucky prisons owned by Corrections Corporation of America.

The state Department of Public Safety hired the Criminal Justice Institute under a $118,000 contract to develop a new classification system for the state that should be in place by the end of the year. The consultants reviewed more than 2,500 files of prison and jail inmates in the Hawai'i system as part of the project.

The report concludes that once the new classification system is in place, nearly 48 percent of Hawai'i's women prison inmates and 23 percent of the men in prison will be classified as community custody inmates. Currently only 37 percent of the women inmates and 19 percent of the men are classified as community custody.

The report found 5.7 percent of the male inmates serving time in medium security prisons on the Mainland and 22 percent of the women Mainland inmates qualify as community custody prisoners.

Under the new system, prison inmates will be classified in the categories of maximum, medium, minimum and community custody depending on the risks they pose.

Factors used to determine prisoners' custody levels include the length of sentence remaining, their behavior history in prison, and their accomplishments such as completing drug treatment programs or earning educational credits.

Clayton Frank, director of the state Department of Public Safety, said the report supports the department's plans to add re-integration facilities for returning inmates, including adding low-security beds at the community correctional centers around the state.

Reach Kevin Dayton at kdayton@honoluluadvertiser.com.