“Incarceration affects not only an individual person, but everything and everyone connected to them. Families are torn apart, children are left without their parents, and whole communities are dismantled.”
—The Disparate Treatment of Native Hawaiians in the Criminal Justice System (2010)
A new justice ecology
We envision a novel justice ecology based on two parallel initiatives: GROUND-UP efforts that engage and empower communities to problem solve and support new justice pathways for individuals; and INSIDE-OUT efforts that transform existing institutions through education, policy reform, and community partnerships. These approaches blend short- and long-term remedies that intimate an end to incarceration as we know it.
GROUND-UP efforts begin with public education and focus on building community based and culturally-grounded diversion pathways that will provide off-ramps from the existing criminal justice system. This project envisions and seeds alternative peace-keeping resources that reduce the role of the police; alternative courts that anchor powers of adjudication in the community; and sentencing practices that connect individuals to personal navigators. We envision facilities and programs that address challenges related to housing, mental health, substance abuse, domestic violence, unemployment, and social and cultural estrangement.
This project empowers existing community organizations to plan and fill such roles. We also envision institutional transformation from INSIDE OUT, through bail and sentencing reform; new approaches to education; expanded peace-keeping skills for police and public safety training programs; and community partnerships that integrate 'aina-based programs into every facility. 'Aina-based programs restore cultural and genealogical relationships to the land, connecting individuals to traditional knowledge, practices, and values that promote community well-being. This ecological approach readies institutions, communities, and individuals for integration within a distributed system of responsibility and care.
Project pathway
GROUND UP—Long-term
Launch a community education initiative to gather personal and community narratives in documentary films, graphic, web, social media, and public events, including partnering with the Hawai'i International Film Festival. Amplify work through public relations and impact campaigns.
Establish a public policy platform that connects people to information and mobilizes testimony campaigns.
Conduct community engagement and cultural competence training. Lead workshops and "talk-story" sessions with diverse community members and incarcerated individuals and families to envision new models for justice.
Strengthen community programs to support peace-keeping, navigation, alternative courts, restorative justice, housing, health, education, employment, social, and cultural services.
Explore sustainable funding pathways.
Plan, design, and pilot new community.
run supportive housing models, including furlough, transitional, and affordable housing options with wraparound services.
Evaluate to support improvement and permanent funding.
INSIDE OUT—Short-term
Align stakeholders, government agencies, legislators, judges, police, and community organizations.
Pilot new education partnerships and training programs for police and public safety personnel.
Pilot bail and sentencing practices.
Develop diversion practices with police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges.
Strengthen social enterprise programs to develop employment pathways.
Establish 'aina-based cultural programs for each facility that offer a continuum of mentorship and participation in and out of corrections.
Evaluate.
Impacts
Based on 2017 data, our work has the potential to directly impact approximately 16,000 people detained through arrests; 5,600 people incarcerated in jails and prisons; 1,500 people on parole; and 20,500 people on probation, per year. Impact will also extend to the family members of incarcerated individuals, who suffer from lost income, stigma, and employment barriers. Children especially suffer adverse outcomes, which perpetuate the intergenerational and systemic inequities of the criminal justice system. The cost of incarcerating 1,925 pre-trial detainees or parole and probation violators at a rate of $198 per person per day amounts to $381,744 per day, over $139 million per year. Reducing this specific population by half, for example, would allow resources to flow to community organizations better positioned to provide housing, health, education, social, and cultural resources for individuals struggling with poverty, drug addiction, trauma, mental health vulnerabilities, and houselessness.
Innovation
Our GROUND UP-INSIDE-OUT approach to reform acknowledges the need for deep collaboration among communities and existing institutions to effectively and permanently transform carceral environments, perceptions, and habits of mind. For the first time in Hawai'i's history, we have assembled the necessary representatives and resources to accomplish this task. Our approach uniquely explores Native Hawaiian and Pacific Island indigenous knowledge, values, and practices for insight into the design and implementation of new, place-based models for peace-keeping, adjudication, and corrections.
Cultural competence expands the global discourse on humane carceral alternatives, which seek to promote rehabilitation through dignity. Hawai'i's demography, shaped by its indigenous, immigrant, and colonial past--and no less through its multicultural present--offers a singular cultural and geographic context for this approach. Hawai'i provides an ideal laboratory for an ecological approach to place-based processes, programming, and facilities designed to apply community tools and indigenous techniques in a system of justice that heals.