Column: Ige should fund commission overseeing correctional systems

As recently reported in this newspaper, Gov. David Ige continues to withhold funding for the Hawaii Correctional Systems Oversight Commission, which the state Legislature created two years ago to oversee the Department of Public Safety (“Ige again withholds funding for corrections oversight,” March 1). The commission currently consists of five volunteer members. It has no staff, and as readers of this paper know, DPS has long done a deplorable job of managing the state’s jails and prisons.

Without funding, the Corrections Commission is all hat and no cattle. It cannot monitor and inspect correctional facilities. It cannot investigate complaints from inmates and staff. It cannot report findings and problems to the public. It cannot propose or push for reforms. And it cannot move this state from its presently punitive approach to corrections — which is inhumane and ineffective — to a more rehabilitative and restorative ethos.

As commission Chairman Mark Patterson has lamented, unless there are staff to follow through on the Commissioners’ plans, they are “just talking.”

Approximately $370,000 is needed to hire four commission staff for the next two years (as the Attorney General’s Office has requested). Ige’s decision to withhold this modest sum is rooted in denial of the many problems that have long afflicted DPS and harmed our state, from overcrowding, sexual assault, and suicide to high rates of recidivism, the understaffing of medical and mental health services, and a severe shortage of meaningful programs for inmates. And the governor’s denial of these problems reflects a political sensibility that is as common as it is counterproductive — to keep a lid on things that stink.

Ige claims that “starting new programs doesn’t really make a lot of sense right now (in the pandemic), considering the state of the economy.”

But the money being requested is just 7% of the cost of the damages ($5.3 million) caused by the March 2019 riot in the Maui Community Correctional Center. Moreover, starting new programs now actually makes a lot of sense — because of the pandemic. As of mid-January, more than 2,000 Hawaii inmates and correctional staff had tested positive for the coronavirus, making prisons and jails the most dangerous places in our state, with rates of infection far higher than those in the general population.

Oversight by the Corrections Commission could lead to much-needed changes. It would also bring greater transparency to a department that is notoriously secretive about matters of major importance. The pandemic has only increased the need for greater public oversight.

The governor’s budget is now being reviewed by the Legislature, which can add funding items if it wants. Down the road, the governor could, once again, refuse to release the money that the commission needs to become more than an empty shell. But the Legislature should make the necessary budget amendments, and the rest of us should join the corrections commissioners in calling out the governor for his remarkably bad judgment.

It is never too late to start doing the right thing.

David T. Johnson is professor of sociology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.