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The question this 1995 episode addressed was how Hawaii would manage a prison population that had roughly doubled from the capacity its facilities were built to hold. Tom Farrell, a former deputy attorney general who had handled prison litigation for the state, argued that the overcrowding amounted to a slow-motion constitutional crisis: without significant expansion of prison capacity, the state would eventually lose control of its facilities either through inmate unrest, guard misconduct, or further federal court intervention. Martha Torney, an official with the Department of Public Safety, acknowledged that overcrowding was straining every part of the criminal justice system—courts, prosecutors, police, and corrections—and that some dangerous individuals were being released or never incarcerated because space was unavailable. Both guests agreed that drugs, particularly crystal methamphetamine, were driving much of the increase in the prison population, and both acknowledged that construction costs made expansion politically difficult, while Torney raised the possibility of privatisation as one option under consideration.
Transcript
Read or download the full transcript (.txt). Speaker labels were assigned automatically and may contain errors.
Companion newspaper commentaries
Commentaries by the guests, published in The Honolulu Advertiser around the broadcast.
