Jodie Maesaka-Hirata

The Abercrombie administration was handed a setback Wednesday when a state Senate committee stripped provisions from a House-passed bill that would follow an ambitious initiative aimed at returning inmates on mainland prison facilities to the islands. But the state’s new Public Safety director retains her goal to revise prison policies.

The House initiative was the result of a Justice Reinvestment proposal by the Council of State Government Justice Center, a New York nonprofit that helps states improve their correctional systems. Jodie Maesaka-Hirata, Hawaii’s first woman public safety director, has embraced the proposal to reduce recidivism, decrease the prison population and strengthen public safety.

The Senate Public Safety, Government Operations and Military Affairs Committee deleted the reforms contained in the House bill, leaving only a proposed increase in membership of the Hawaii Paroling Authority. If the action is approved by the full Senate, the reform proposals could rebound in House-Senate conferences next month.

The legislative action followed the arrest last week of four city park supervisors and eight inmates of the Oahu Community Correctional Center, accused of trying to sneak crystal methamphetamine, an “ice” pipe and tobacco onto the prison grounds. The inmates were participants in a supervised outside work program and had been allowed by the city supervisors, against rules, to swim and relax at Ala Moana Beach Park’s Magic Island.

The outside work line is an integral part of

Maesaka-Hirata’s plan to help inmates prepare for their ultimate release. She doesn’t believe the arrests should be a setback, if, indeed, it figured into the Senate committee’s decision.

Maesaka-Hirata has an impressive career in corrections, since earning her bachelor’s degree at the University of Hawaii and a master’s at Chaminade University. Her father and her brother had been corrections officers. From her interest in helping children in the public schools system, she found “that it was the parents who needed to be addressed.” She found that one family had been imprisoned through five generations.

She never aspired to head the state’s Department of Public Safety, but has found the job to be enlightening.

“The job has really opened my eyes,” Maesaka-Hirata said, “not only about corrections, but law enforcement and how the department is pivotal in terms of public safety.”

Question: Hawaii Paroling Authority Chairman Bert Matsuoka has said there are a number of inmates who don’t want parole. They want to get out of prison with no obligation.

Answer: I think as a practitioner coming from the level, from the line, we have always been of the stance that people should be transitioning out, because what you find is that if you put somebody straight on the street, they have no place to go, they have no job, they have no family support, they end up living on the street, committing another crime and coming back in, quicker.

So what you want to do is give them an opportunity to establish themselves in a community, whether it’s hooking them up to services that can assist them for financial assistance; if needed mental health services, medical services, those type of things; if they’re able to, attain employment, find housing, reconnect with their families or people that can sponsor them, where they can live.

So you want to get them to the point where they have some footing, going out with shoes. The rest is going out with bare feet, and running on rock. It’s difficult for the people … They have a strike against them. They have the title of being a convict, or somebody who’s been incarcerated. …

If I was to apply for a job and I was an ex-felon or a felon still serving my time, versus a guy who doesn’t have any crime behind me, but the two of us have the same level of educational experience, high school experience, he’s been out working from job to job to job, but he’s been working, I have been in jail for 10 years, the only job I had was sporadically working in the kitchen or cleaning the floors, I had no permanent address, he has all these things ready to go, who do you think they’re gong to hire?

The point is to get their personal documents like birth certificates, Social Security cards, to prepare them for when they go out to the community — they’re ready for that transition of being there.

Q: What do you do with inmates who don’t want any of that?

A: That’s our job: to motivate them. That’s why we have social workers,

parole officers, probation officers in the front end, to work with them and to change their way of thinking. That’s always the difficult part, because now you’re dealing with human behavior. We cannot control what other people think or do, but we can certainly help them see what’s happening if they don’t make changes in their lives.

Q: City Prosecutor Keith Kaneshiro used to have your present job title, and he has been pretty critical of the Justice Reinvestment report. Where do you disagree with his assessment?

A: We have a lot of the same thought-patterns. Our biggest concern is, No. 1, public safety. No. 2 is that I think his contention to the legislative body and the community is (right), that we need to have the infrastructure set up. We need to have the positions ready for supervision. We need to have the programs valued to the community identified and ready to go for these people transitioning out. We need to look at more services. We agree on those type of things.

I think his biggest thing is having infrastructure, and right now we don’t have infrastructure. We are trying to establish that through this process. So his thing is take a step back, set it up and then let’s go, because he does support victim services, he does believe that people should be supervised transitioning out and getting support services. …

We need to have a prison built. We need to look at what capacity we have and make sure we do repair and maintenance, because for years and years we never received money for that. Our facilities are falling apart. Maui is falling apart so bad that it just needs to be torn down and needs to be replaced.

What is the best use of the facilities that we currently have? Are we maximizing its capability and capacity? For some of them it’s over and beyond. … It’s about looking at what we have. Can we save it? Can we utilize it?

Q: Why is legislation needed?

A: What we want is consistency and continuity. … We’re thinking about the future. The last Parole Board, and the Parole Board before that, were a lot more punitive. If you came back on a parole violation, you could be held for an entire maximum, and it could have been for a technical violation. … The Parole Board now will look at your whole situation and say, OK, evidence tell us that it’s better to provide you with support services in the communality, go to the treatment services, so you can continue to receive treatment, you can still be employed, continue to work with whatever issues you have, additional social services, mental health, or whatever you need in social services, or work that way, versus locking people up. We want to be able to continue that trend and look at how we can better service individuals besides just locking them up and throwing away the key.

It’s a tool that basically gives us an opportunity to better assess an individual, and also helps the court make a determination how they should be given further individual supervision and what type of follow-up that the person would need in terms of further assessment and services.

So all that was taken out of there, even the recommendation for victim services positions and other things in terms of supervising inmates who are soon to max out on their sentence.

Q: Why is that provision needed?

A: What happened with the OCCC situation (last week), where the guys were out there (at Ala Moana Beach Park’s Magic Island), and we sent them out there to gain work skills and some work ethics, that’s part of the whole thing about supervision while they’re transitioning. You want them to be able to go into a reentry program or furlough program, and part of that is starting on work lines that are supervised, out in the community. So it gives them an opportunity to fully transition instead of just freely go other there.

When they go out in the community on the work lines, they can see what’s out there, kind of get acclimated as they’re driving by. Because a lot of people who come back from the mainland (prison facilities), things change, and some of them have been in custody for a very long time. They don’t even know how much it costs to catch a bus, or where the bus stops are now. It kind of gives them a visual feel as they go out on work lines where some of these things are, and meet people and have an opportunity to interact with people who are out in the community. So these types of program are very viable and very important in terms of transition.

As a person ended the sentence or even the minimum term, we want to give them opportunities and have them be supervised out in the community before parole, or even on parole, before they max out, and that’ll give you an idea how they’re going to behave. But if you just release them out without any footing or foundation, they can totally be lost out in the community, become homeless immediately.

Last year, an individual was paralyzed and went on a wheel chair and said he was left at a bus stop for two days. Without any transition programming, this is the kind of stuff that’s going to happen that we don’t want to happen to these individuals. …

Q: What was your reaction to what happened last week?

A: I was totally dismayed and very disheartened because these are seasoned workers. They were trusted workers, and they were actually there to set forth standards for these guys as they transition, teach them work skills, teach them work ethics, interact with them, teach them what it is like to be supervised by a real supervisor, and when this happened I was just stunned.

Q: Did that incident damage your attempt to get the contents of the bill before the Legislature approved?

A: I don’t think so. I’ve had some positive feedback that this is part of the reason why we need to have these bills moved, so that we can have programs that service those who are transitioning back or are going to be returning to the community. …

It’s a reminder to everybody that we cannot be lax, that people need to follow protocols. The prosecutor (Kaneshiro) and I have the same feeling, that public safety is No. 1. We don’t want any further victimization.

(Legislators) don’t want people getting hurt, and that includes our own clients, who are inmates, and when they’re supervised they should be supervised properly. When they’re sent out on a work line to learn, they should be taught work ethics, they should be taught standards.

It just has that blase attitude like, well, uh, OK, we’ll work here and do whatever after. That’s not what we try to instill in them.

What we want to teach them is that they’re going out there to look for job, not just because they’ve got to look for a job, but this is something to sustain them and help keep them out of jail.