Prison should be a solution of last resort in dealing with most people who disrupt society. In cases of violent crimes or property crimes that could quickly escalate, certainly the community is best served by restricting the offender’s freedom.
But it’s counterproductive to throw first-time offenders, most frequently charged with drug and alcohol offenses, into the penal system if there’s a way to redirect them more effectively.
That seems to be the reasonable consensus reached this week at a legislative briefing on a range of youth-protection issues. On one of those issues — youth incarceration — even the person most directly involved acknowledged that is not the answer for Hawaii’s youth.
David Hipp, administrator for the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility, said incarceration diminishes the effectiveness of rehabilitation programs for many of the youths who come to his institution.
"All the national studies show that after six to nine months, you get diminishing returns after you lock the child up," he told the Star-Advertiser later. "And here in Hawaii we have the tendency to commit kids for longer than that."
Beyond that, there are children at HYCF for whom prison is wholly inappropriate, Hipp said. These would be the youths who have substance-abuse or mental-health challenges who are more a threat to themselves than to the community that the prison is there to protect.
The good news is that Hipp came away encouraged that the profile of the problem has been raised and that Hawaii is more actively seeking alternatives to juvenile detention.
This week, he said, community leaders from the judiciary, corrections and other sectors began meeting to look for ways to coordinate their efforts. Judges already have the discretion to send an errant youth to a community-based program, but there’s not enough capacity in the programs to handle the need. Pooling resources would help, Hipp said.
Already HYCF is piloting programs to allow tracking kids on probation in the community to ensure they have support to stay on course, and to provide intensive day treatment on Oahu.
State Rep. John Mizuno, chairman of the House Human Services Committee that hosted the briefing, cited Adult Friends for Youth as an example of another nonprofit outreach program that could be deployed as an alternative.
"We should be moving toward a progressive system to improve recidivism rates among youth by more mentoring/tracking programs," he said in an emailed response to a query. "Youth would have a mentor to work with every day, in their community — on school, staying focused toward education, employment and workforce development and working on people skills."
Mizuno rightly underscored the need for better coordination of existing programs — "We can do this without additional tax dollars," he said — and added that ineffective programs should be terminated.
Locking up kids in a youth facility costs more than delivering services in a community context, Hipp said. For those who continue to offend, incarceration remains as a consequence for that bad behavior. Hawaii’s innovative program for adult probationers, Project Hope, is based on the idea that imposing a brief prison sentence can scare some of them straight, and that fallback option should be explored as a deterrent for youths as well.
If the ultimate goal is to guide more young people toward a life within the community, then Hawaii must capitalize on alternatives other than the correctional lock and key.
