The Honolulu Prosecutor’s Safe House purports to provides secure shelter for single victims of domestic violence for up to two years, if and only if they agree to abide by conditions that include not leaving the gated grounds without an escort, not using cellphones or email, and most troublingly, cooperating with prosecutors by testifying against their abusers (“Safe House?”, Star-Advertiser, April 2). Victims who refuse to accept conditions that replicate the power relationship they are trying to flee need not apply.

The Safe House has been open for six months and has served four victims at an annual cost to the city of $400,000 to $500,000, and already it is the target of much deserved criticism. An adviser on domestic violence to former President Barack Obama calls it “a terrible idea,” and the Vice President of the National Network to End Domestic Violence says it “violates everything we know to be best practices for helping victims of domestic violence.”

Yet Honolulu Prosecutor Keith Kaneshiro remains committed to an institution that is nothing like what the Hawaii State Coalition Against Domestic Violence spent years meeting and planning for. He even claims that the reason no other prosecutor in America has opened a similar safe house is that nobody else has thought of it.

At the root of this problem is Kaneshiro’s blinkered view of his own role as prosecutor. “We’re not in the business of providing social services,” he says. “We’re in the business of prosecution.”

But it is unacceptable to coerce testimony from victims of domestic violence by withholding much-needed services from those who do not regard criminal conviction as the best response to their problem. And make no mistake: what is in the best interests of a prosecutor seeking conviction is often not in the best interests of an abused woman.

In the 1935 case Berger v. United States, U.S. Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland captured the complexity of an ethical prosecutor’s role obligations. He stressed that a prosecutor’s interest in a criminal prosecution “is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.”

Thus, a good prosecutor performs two roles: as advocate seeking conviction, and as minister seeking justice. When these obligations conflict, the former should not trump the latter.

Kaneshiro’s misguided Safe House practices are part of a larger pattern of prosecutorial behavior that reflects a preference for criminal conviction and harsh punishment over the interests of justice. He has opposed the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, which would reward criminal justice agencies for the benefits they create and the costs they save. He has opposed Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE), which stresses the certainty of accountability over the severity of punishment. He has lobbied against proposals to downsize Hawaii’s prison population and to bring home local offenders incarcerated in private prisons on the mainland. He has resisted reasonable efforts to release inmates on parole. And he has routinely practiced a coercive form of plea bargaining which obtains criminal convictions by threatening defendants with more severe sanctions if they exercise their right to trial.

Honolulu’s Unsafe House should be retired or redesigned to follow widely recognized best practices in domestic violence cases. More broadly, the residents of this state need to recognize the central role prosecutors have played in defining criminal justice policy and driving up the state’s rate of incarceration five-fold over the past 40 years.

Prosecutors in Hawaii have more control over life, liberty and reputation than any other officials. It is time to take their power seriously – and to hold them accountable for how they exercise and abuse it.

David T. Johnson, Meda Chesney-Lind and Nicholas Chagnon teach in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.