A New Billion Dollar Jail Will Leave Hawai’i Worse Off

At the request of the Hawai’i-based Reimagining Safety Coalition, the Prison Policy Initiative examined the state’s plans for a new jail and found serious issues.

by Regan Huston, February 27, 2025

On Thursday, the Hawai’i-based Reimagining Public Safety Coalition released a new analysis by the Prison Policy Initiative that closely examined plans to build a new correctional facility to replace the current O’ahu Community Correctional Center (OCCC). The memo found serious flaws with the proposed construction that would undermine public safety, exacerbate racial disparities, and worsen existing staffing problems.

The 17-page memo argues three key points:

1. Pretrial incarceration is overused in Hawai’i, causing harm to the public. A growing body of research shows that using jails to incarcerate people pretrial not only undermines the presumption of innocence, but also causes lasting harm to public safety and public health.
2. Jail expansion would exacerbate existing racial disparities in Hawaii’s criminal legal system. Hawaii’s criminal legal system disproportionately affects Native Hawaiians and other non-white minority groups. Building a new, nearly billion-dollar jail not only risks entrenching existing harmful criminal legal system practices, but also uses money that is desperately needed to improve the lives of Native Hawaiians and others in the community.
3. Building a new jail is unlikely to decrease the harms caused by pretrial incarceration, and is likely to make existing staffing problems worse.When new facilities are built without a change in the personnel delivering services inside, existing harms persist. Moreover, many of the harms caused by jailing are a result of the very fact of being removed from family and community, regardless of the conditions inside.

The memo also points out that the current plan for the jail ignores straightforward measures that could be used to reduce Hawaii’s jail population, many of which are actually cited in the Forecast Report, including:

• Changing how it deals with technical violations of probation. In January 2025, 21% of OCCC’s population were there for technical violations, such as missing appointments or not notifying a probation officer of a change of address — things that are not crimes in any other context. This is a huge percentage in comparison to other municipalities.
• Decreasing the pretrial population of its jails by implementing bail reform. As of July 2024, 61.7% of the people detained at OCCC were pretrial detainees who have not been convicted of a crime. Many of these people are there simply because they’re too poor to pay their bail.

The memo explains that with ample opportunities to lower its jail population, Hawai’i is in a strong position to decrease the number of jail beds it needs. Decarceration is the solution that is most likely to promote public health and well-being, manage staffing problems, and provide a better justice system for Hawai’i residents.

Is your community seeking to build a new jail or expand the capacity of its existing facility? We’re happy to help you push back on their arguments (drop us a line to tell us about your fight). There is no need to wait, though. We have created a how-to-guide with tips for pushing back on “jail needs assessments” that local leaders put together to justify the construction and provide strategies for pushing back on false or misleading arguments they’re making.