State prison officials are investigating how two people escaped from Maui Community Correctional Center on Tuesday.

Tasha Gonsalves, 29, was last seen two hours before a 5:30 a.m. head count, said Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Toni Schwartz. Maui police arrested her at 2 p.m. Tuesday.

Later Tuesday afternoon, Leif Valdez, 26, was reported missing at a 3 p.m. head count. Valdez, a community custody inmate who was housed in a minimum-security dorm on the perimeter of the facility, was serving a 15-day sentence for petty misdemeanor theft.

Valdez is 5 feet 6 inches tall, weighs 150 pounds and has brown hair and eyes.

He is the third person to escape from MCCC in two years and the 21st escape from a state correctional facility since 2012.

Schwartz said staff members are working hard to maintain security but are struggling with aging and overcrowded facilities. She said most of the state correctional facilities were built in the 1960s with some sections of Oahu Community Correctional Center dating to the 1940s.

"We never want to see escapes happen," she said in an email. "Our old, outdated jail facilities on every island are in need of replacement with new, more modern facilities."

MCCC is surrounded by a 25-foot chain-link fence topped by razor wire.

Gonsalves was being held in a minimum-security dorm inside the fence. The dorm, which has 34 beds and is nearly full, has two doorways with alarms and windows that don’t open.

The Department of Public Safety is investigating how Gonsalves and Valdez escaped. Schwartz said before Valdez was reported missing that DPS investigators were questioning other detainees about Gonsalves’ escape.

Before Gonsalves’ escape, she was being held in lieu of $15,000 bail, awaiting trial for theft, forgery and fraudulent use of a credit card.

Schwartz said Gonsalves was a "community custody" detainee, the lowest of five security classifications. The remaining, in descending order, are maximum, closed, medium and minimum security. Higher security detainees are held in the main building.

Junior Jorju was the last person to escape from MCCC before Gonsalves. He scaled MCCC’s fence on July 13, 2014, and was captured a day later. Details on how he got out of the building where he was being held as a community custody inmate were not available Tuesday.

Since 2012, nine prisoners have escaped from low-security work furlough facilities, two fled during transport to court, and 10 — including Tuesday’s escapes — escaped from prison or jail facilities.

Escapees from Hawaii prison and jail facilities include two women who, in separate incidents, scaled a fence at the low-security Hale Nani facility where they were staying because of overcrowding at Hawaii Community Correctional Center; two men who walked out of the minimum-security Waiawa Correctional Facility in separate incidents; one man who escaped from OCCC by climbing through the ceiling; and three who escaped from MCCC.

In December 2012, two men broke out of HCCC by overpowering a corrections officer and taking off in the librarian’s car.

Besides Valdez, one other escapee remained at large Tuesday afternoon: Lyndal Gilliland, who was reported missing from Hale Nani on May 8.