Editorial: Pursue purchase of federal jail

Even before it opened in 2001, the Federal Detention Center (FDC) in Honolulu had booked reservations for about 100 pretrial detainees from the overcrowded Oahu Community Correctional Center.

Today, OCCC is still overcrowded, and the FDC still hosts the state’s inmates — about 160 in a recent count. Still, there’s plenty of room: The facility has only about 400 inmates in a building with a total capacity of 1,200.

If anything has changed, it’s the worsening condition of OCCC, which was built in 1916 and is now an inefficient, outmoded jail in the heart of Kalihi. It held about 1,100 inmates at the end of last year; most of the inmates are pretrial detainees or male felons preparing to reintegrate into society.

Replacing OCCC is long overdue. Cramming inmates together in such a facility is inhumane, not to mention a potential legal liability for the state. The jail also sits on prime urban land ripe for redevelopment, near a planned rail stop, an area targeted for transit-oriented development.

The question is how to replace it.

The state is pursuing plans to build a new jail. A 280-page environmental impact statement recommended building a new facility on the animal quarantine station site in Halawa, and Gov. David Ige wants $5 million to figure out how to finance it. The estimated cost of construction is about $525 million.

Or, as state Rep. Gregg Takayama has proposed, the state could try to buy the FDC. If the federal Bureau of Prisons is amenable, it could be a better solution, and less expensive than the financial and political minefield of a major state construction project.

Takayama introduced House Bill 1177, which would put money on the table to convince the feds that the state is serious about buying the facility. The current administration, he noted, has “not said no.”

“With Congress passing a federal prison reform act that is expected to reduce the population of their prisons and jails, I think it makes sense for us to put money on the table and offer to buy it,” he said.

What also makes sense is reform at the state level. Plans to replace OCCC shouldn’t be done in isolation; they should anticipate progress to reduce the jail population, particularly through bail reform, which would make it easier for poor or indigent detainees to get out of jail pending resolution of their cases.

In its December 2018 report, the HCR 85 Task Force on Prison Reform recommended numerous other avenues worth pursuing as well, including shorter sentences, downgraded offenses, and the broader goal of transitioning from a punitive to a rehabilitative correctional system. And while the task force took a dim view of the state’s plans to build a new jail, it did not deny the need for one.

The report rejected the idea of building a new, 1,380-bed jail on Oahu, saying the state should “immediately stop planning a large new jail to replace OCCC and establish a working group of stakeholders and government officials to rethink the jail issue and create a jail that is smaller, smarter, and less expensive than the one now under consideration.”

HB 1177 cleared the House but was deferred after a joint hearing of the Senate’s Public Safety, Intergovernmental and Military Affairs Committee, chaired by Sen. Clarence Nishihara, and the Government Operations Committee, chaired by Sen. Laura Thielen.

Thielen said she favors the measure, but would also include funds to lease more bed space at the FDC if the feds won’t sell. Nishihara, on the other hand, said he did not want to pursue the purchase of a jail designed primarily for detention rather than rehabilitation, and lose the opportunity to build one with facilities that can help inmates gain the skills they need.

But can the state and/or a private partner build such a jail on time and on budget? Or can the FDC be retrofitted at a lower cost and still get the job done? It’s an idea worth pursuing. Resurrect HB 1177.