Hawaii prisons mistaken about marriage issue

While much of the nation debates whether a couple of the same gender should be allowed to marry, Abercrombie administration officials have challenged matrimony between a state prison inmate and an opposite-sex civilian — a constitutional right that the U.S. Supreme Court protected 25 years ago. The state needs to back away from the claim that it can routinely deny the right of inmates to get married.

Four women who want to wed Hawaii male inmates incarcerated at an Arizona facility are suing state Public Safety Director Jodie Maesaka-Hirata and other officials for blocking their marriages. The department adopted a policy last June allowing wardens to deny inmates the right to wed if they consider the marriage a threat to security, good government of the institution or protection of the public.

The policy is rightly being challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii.

Male inmates wanting to exchange vows with women outside prison were advised by letter from Shari Kimoto, a branch coordinator of the Public Safety Department, to ditch their plans. She said the prisoners are incapable of providing the necessary emotional, financial and physical support that every marriage needs to succeed, and their inability to communicate face to face with their fiancees would be detrimental to future reintegration efforts.

All that sounds, oddly, more like subjective marriage pre-counseling — not legally sound government policy that should steer clear of violating rights.

In one of the four cases, Kimoto claimed that the prisoner was convicted of sexually assaulting a minor and his fiance has a 16-year-old child; her fiance has 10 years left on his sentence. Obviously, the prison officials are applying pure conjecture in objecting to the marriage.

In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Missouri’s "almost complete ban on the decision (for an inmate) to marry is not reasonably related to legiti- mate penological objectives," even though prison officials "may regulate the time and circumstances under which the marriage ceremony itself takes place."

In the high court’s opinion in Turner v. Safley, then-Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that "where the inmate wishes to marry a civilian, the decision to marry (apart from the logistics of the wedding ceremony) is a completely private one."

In short, the Hawaii prison system’s new policy is more extreme than what the Supreme Court had disallowed. In the Missouri case, the prison officials’ objections had "centered almost exclusively on female inmates marrying other inmates or ex-felons," O’Connor noted, and they "usually did not object to the marriage of either male or female prisoners to civilians."

The Supreme Court already has chosen not to meddle in the partnership of heterosexual couples, in prison or not, and Hawaii’s prisons should honor that recognition.