Hawaii Oversight Commission Finds ‘Unacceptable’ Conditions At The Crowded Hilo Jail 6 Corrections officials agree to transfer inmates to a prison on Oahu to ease dangerous overcrowding at the Hawaii Community Correctional Center.
Severe overcrowding and other problems at the dilapidated Hilo jail have become so bad the state is launching a stop-gap program to move some inmates to Oahu and to borrow maintenance staff from other facilities to repair broken lights, cracked cell windows and fix other problems at the facility.
That initiative by the Department of Public Safety to try to make the jail safer and improve conditions for inmates was triggered by a damning new report on the facility based on a recent walk-through of the jail by staff and a member of the Hawaii Correctional Systems Oversight Commission.
Several of the problems identified in the report, which was released Friday, are identical to the jail conditions cited by a federal judge last year when she ruled there was a “strong likelihood” that HCCC inmates could prove in court that the conditions they endured at the jail were so poor they violated the prisoners’ constitutional rights.
