While pineapple and sugar are down, the Aloha State is still the U.S.A.'s No. 1 exporter of one thing: prisoners.

Hurray for us! We send more prisoners out of state than anyone else! Along with them — appromixately 1,850 in all — we send about $36 million that could be invested in the local economy. What's left behind are broken 'ohana, broken schools — and broken promises to treat our brothers, sisters, moms and dads with dignity.

Better yet, out of sight, out of mind. Well, out of conscience at least. Not only have we increased our Mainland warehousing of human beings by 42 percent in the past two years, we have condemned our fellow islanders to sexual assaults, gang-incited melees and pervasive discrimination. We park them in one facility, wait till they get beaten or raped, then move them to another.

Why are we doing this? Drugs, for one thing. Locking up sick ice users. The greatest increase in Hawai'i's overall prison population is for convictions under Chapter 712-1243-Class C felony for ice/crystal methamphetamine. From September 2003 to August 2005, the number of men serving time under this statute increased by more than 50 percent. For women, the number rose nearly 70 percent. Given that prison alone isn't especially successful in keeping people clean, one would hope that treatment services increased at a similar pace. Did they?

Maybe you should ask the Corrections Management Population Commission. This is the official group mandated by the Legislature to establish a prison population cap and keep it there.

But wait. Legislators did not give them a secretary this year, so they closed up shop and went home, leaving Public Safety with no choice but to cuff and shackle our boys and girls and send 'em where the Hawaiian sun don't shine.

Let's say you don't care about shackles. How about money? Last year the Legislature also didn't fund 30 beds for TJ Mahoney & Associates, a community-based reintegration program for women offenders. 68 percent of TJ's women do not return to prison. For those caged elsewhere, the success rate is only 33 percent. TJ asked for $800,000, a per-capita cost of $27,000, compared to $22,000 on the Mainland. If 30 more women went to TJ, 20 would not return to prison.

Now only 10 of them will make it. At $22,000 per year, that will cost us $220,000. Add to that the 30 Mainland beds we would not need ($660,000), and do the math: Taxpayers actually would have made $80,000 on this investment.

(A fundraiser for TJ Mahoney will be held Oct. 14. For information, visit www.reawaken ingforwomen.org or call 748-4300.)

Let's say you don't care about money. How about public safety? In housing female inmates on the Mainland, or even in Kailua's vastly overcrowded Women's Community Correctional Center, we are at twice the risk of people coming out of prison and doing something to go back in.

How safe is that?

If neither shackles nor money nor safety is your thing, how about love? Sending local people to the Mainland destroys families. Already, children with incarcerated parents are six times more likely to go to prison than other children. What happens when they are abandoned completely, not seeing mom or dad for years?

Why remove children, the single greatest motivating factor for many inmates, from moms' and dads' lives? When pride and purpose have been replaced by shame and shackles, what is the sense of removing hope?

These are more questions for the Corrections Management Population Commission.

Playing Santa Claus at the women's prison last Christmas painfully illustrated what it means for kids and moms to be together, regardless of the circumstances. To a woman, the mothers said that they lived for the day they would be reunited with family. To a child, sitting on Santa's lap came second to sitting on mom's, holding her hand, throwing your arms around her neck ... one day closer to the day she comes home.

Rape, riots, risk, ruin: the costs of exporting Hawai'i inmates to the Mainland. Is this the price of Paradise?