🧠 The Gap Between Advocacy and Reality

This month, members of the ACLU and the Reimagining Public Safety Coalition gathered outside Gov. Green’s office to protest $30 million allocated to plan a new correctional facility to replace OCCC. Their argument: that funds should instead go to community care initiatives.

It’s a well-worn refrain—and it sounds good at a rally. But anyone who actually works in the system knows that catchy slogans and petitions don’t clean pest ridden jail cells, stop inmate assaults, or compel uncooperative addicts to attend treatment programs.

🚧 The Case for a New Jail

Opponents frame the new jail as a "super jail" and a giveaway to for-profit interests. But let’s talk facts; a NEW JAIL means:

1. Exponentially better housing Conditions:

Right now, a cell built for 2, houses 3–4 inmates, two on the floor, with all exposed to recurring rounds of lice, bed bugs, roaches, and mold. Even protestors themselves admit the facility is “substandard and deplorable.”

2. New On-Site Programming: In public rehab clinics, people often walk out the front door the moment things get hard. Jail-based treatment changes that dynamic—because walking out isn’t an option. When the choice is “jail or rehab,” structure becomes leverage. Show me real incentives, and I’ll show you real results.

3. Local Reintegration: Without adequate space in Hawaii’s jails and prisons, we ship people to the mainland—cutting them off from family, cultural grounding, and any realistic path to reentry. If you want to see families break the cycle of incarceration, start by keeping people on-island. Proximity to loved ones isn’t just emotional—it’s practical. 

🎯 Final Word

Helping people recover, detox, and restart their lives is not poetic. It’s messy, painful, and often thankless. But it’s necessary. And it doesn’t happen by opposing blueprints from behind a microphone.

Let’s finally move forward and replace OCCC, which—depending on the section—dates back as far as 1916, with major rebuilds in 1950 and a re-designation in 1975. That means many parts of the facility are 75 to over 100 years old, with no significant modernization in decades.

Just curious—any of those pristine Norwegian jails built in 1916 and still cramming four to a cell? Asking for a state that actually wants to fix things.