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The question before this 1997 episode was how Hawaii could manage prison overcrowding without either releasing dangerous offenders or ignoring constitutional limits on prison conditions. Dan Kahan, a University of Chicago Law School professor, argued that shaming penalties and other alternatives to incarceration for non-violent offenders could free prison space without the symbolic costs associated with fines or community service. Peter B. Carlisle, the prosecuting attorney for the City and County of Honolulu, maintained that a decade of court-supervised consent decrees had led to early releases and slower incarceration rates, and that Hawaii urgently needed to build more prison capacity. Dan Foley, a civil rights lawyer and former executive director of the ACLU of Hawaii, countered that the consent decree existed because the state had created unconstitutional conditions, and argued for genuine alternatives to incarceration rather than indefinite expansion. Boyd Mosman, a Maui circuit court judge, described an in-court programme offering certain offenders a choice between jail time and public shaming. Matt Matsunaga, co-chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, discussed the legislature's response to the crisis.
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.
