The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Most will never get a visitor, no matter how long they're incarcerated.
Emerald Nakamura, 26, of Honolulu, who is serving five years for forging checks, sees her 20-month old son Ikaika once a month -- on a video screen. She said he doesn't recognize her.
"It is very sad," she said. "I think about him all the time."
The Hawaiians are housed at the Otter Creek Correctional Center because of severe prison crowding in their native state, and because incarcerating inmates on the mainland saves Hawaii money.
Even with the price of flying inmates across the Pacific and back, it's still cheaper to house them in the continental United States. It costs $56 per day to house each inmate off the islands, compared with $110 in heavily unionized Hawaii, where a gallon of milk is $6.
Ten years after Hawaii started exporting prisoners, nearly half its 3,858 inmates are lodged in the continental United States -- in rural Mississippi, Oklahoma, Arizona and Kentucky, all in prisons owned by Corrections Corporation of America.
The Nashville-based company says it has saved the state $158 million since 1998.
But prisoner-rights advocates in Hawaii say it is a false economy.
"The cost per bed may be cheaper, but not when you include the cost of broken families," said Kat Brady, coordinator for the Community Alliance on Prisons in Honolulu. "It is hard for a woman to come home after three or five or 10 years and say, 'I'm your mom,' when her child has never been able to visit her."
The Hawaii Department of Public Safety doesn't dispute that sending inmates out of state is hard on them, said Shari Kimoto, who runs its mainland branch. But she said the agency has no choice because the people of Hawaii don't want prisons built in their back yards, and the remaining open areas that can still be developed are prized for resorts.
Kimoto acknowledges that separation is particularly hard on women, who traditionally have been the primary caregivers in their families. But that is where her sympathy ends.
"I don't think they had their children or families on their mind when they did their crimes or did their drugs," she said.
The Hawaiians have been held at Otter Creek since September, when CCA reopened it as a women's prison; 399 Kentucky women also are held in the facility, which once housed about 600 men from Indiana and also was the scene of a nine-hour riot in July 2001.
But the Hawaiians went unnoticed outside of Wheelwright, a former coal camp, until Sarah Ah Mau, 43, died mysteriously Dec. 31 after complaining for a month of a stomachache. The cause of her death is still under investigation.
Hawaiian news organizations reported that she'd told family members before her death that her pleas for medical attention went ignored. CCA said in a statement that her care was appropriate.
A Courier-Journal reporter was allowed to interview 10 of the Hawaiians but barred from asking any questions about Ah Mau's death; Warden Joyce Arnold also insisted that the prison's security director monitor the interviews.
Adjusting to Kentucky
About half the women are serving time for using and selling crystal methamphetamine -- known as ice -- which swept through the islands in the 1990s.
The women interviewed said they deserved to be punished but questioned the fairness of being sent so far from home.
"It is like a double punishment," said Deenie Tanele, 33, who has been locked up since 1999 for smoking and selling ice and will serve out her term until 2009.
The U.S. Supreme Court, however, ruled in a case from Hawaii in 1983 that an inmate has no "justifiable expectation that he will be incarcerated in any particular state."
Most states, including Kentucky, ship only a few inmates to other states, usually for security reasons. (Kentucky has 19 housed elsewhere; Indiana has none, according to corrections departments in both states.)
Wisconsin, which six years ago had more than 5,000 prisoners out of state, leading the nation in that category, brought the last of them home last year, said John Dipko, a spokesman for the state corrections department.
The state acted in part so its prisoners would have more family support and be less likely to commit more crimes, Dipko said.
Otter Creek is the fourth stop for many of the Hawaiian women. They were removed from prisons in Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado after other private companies allegedly violated contracts by refusing to provide promised vocational training and drug treatment.
In Colorado, two of the inmates allegedly were sexually assaulted, and inmates had to teach their own vocational classes.
The women say their hardest adjustment in Kentucky has been to the weather. The average February temperature in Wheelwright is 35 degrees, compared with 73 in Honolulu.
"The cold is unbelievable," said Iwalani Carroll-Vierra, 27, who is also serving time for selling ice and noted that she must sleep fully dressed because she is allergic to her blankets.
The Hawaiians also have had to allow for subtle but significant cultural differences, said Catherine Samuel, 65, who is serving 20 years to life for murder.
For example, guards have confused a hand symbol that signifies good luck in Hawaii with a gang sign, she said. Hawaiians also are more likely to touch one another and hold hands, which Samuel said has been confused with prohibited lesbian advances.
Arnold, the warden, said officials are aware of the differences, which she said came into play earlier this month when an inmate innocently put her hand on an officer's shoulder. Arnold said the inmate nonetheless was placed in segregation under the prison's zero-tolerance policy for touching employees. Kimoto said Hawaiian prisons have the same policy.
As a concession to the Hawaiian diet, prisoners are served rice at least once a day and fresh fruit at least once a week. They also may practice hula and other native dances for one hour twice a week, and they will be allowed to celebrate King Kamehameha Day each June 11, to honor the monarch who unified the Hawaiian Islands.
But Arnold acknowledged that it is hard for the Hawaiians to watch as Kentucky inmates get visited weekly by their families and friends, while nobody comes to see them.
A few have received visits from friends from the mainland, Arnold said, but most say traveling from the islands is so expensive that they're not expecting any visits from home.
Even collect phone calls, at $9.75 for 15 minutes, are expensive enough that some have had to stop calling their families.
Norma Tanele, mother of Deenie, said in a phone interview from Waipahu, near Honolulu, that her phone has been blocked from receiving calls from the prison for two years because she's been unable to pay her bill.
Tanele, 62, said that she scraped together money to visit her daughter once, when she was imprisoned in Colorado, but that she can't afford to fly to Kentucky.
Although Hawaiian churches pay for video teleconferences, Deenie Tanele said they became too emotional for her daughter, Mahini, 9, who is being raised by her grandparents. "If I cry, then she cries, and that's no good," Deenie Tanele said.
Inmates such as Patsy Kahaunaele, 36, who is serving 10 years for selling and using ice, said she worries most that her family members will die and she won't be able to bury them.
The state of Hawaii won't pay to fly inmates home for funerals. They are allowed to listen on the phone, and the state will send them a videotape, Kimoto said.
'Life has been taken away'
Several prisoners praised an intensive drug-treatment program offered at Otter Creek, and said they have more freedom there than at Hawaii's single, crowded women's prison on the island of Oahu.

But Samuel said the private prison has been slow to provide them with prescription medicines they got for years at other facilities.
Lorraine Robinson, the director of a Honolulu-based program that helps female inmates re-enter civilian life -- Ka Hale Ho'ala Hou No Na Wahine (Home of Reawakening for Women) -- said that being so far from home makes it hard for the women at Otter Creek to hold out hope.
"They are on shaky ground to begin with," she said of the many who are addicted to drugs, depressed and lacking resiliency, "and this makes it worse."
Deborah Mainnaaupo, 54, who is serving 20 years for attempted assault, said the Hawaiian women feel like "we are all on death row. Life has been taken away from us. It is too cold. They should leave us in Hawaii, where we belong."
Looking out the barred windows of the visiting room to the barbed wire, cliffs and mountains outside, Kahaunaele laughed at the security that keeps the Hawaiians locked inside.
"I don't think it would be possible for us to escape," she said. "But even if we could, where would we go?"

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Reporter Andrew Wolfson can be reached at (502) 582-7189.