Alvin Bronstein, nationally recognized prison-reform leader, who is the director emeritus of the ACLU National Prison Project, warned of serious overcrowding.
"Your state prison system has serious overcrowding problems today," he warned.
He noted that the state is working out a series of prison expansions, but that in two years the state might again be in trouble.
"No county, no state, no country has ever built its way out of prison overcrowding.
"Adding more prison beds will have no impact on crime. Crime rates will go up and down, as they have in the rest of the country, because of demographics, economic conditions, unemployment, immigration and drug policy and a variety of other socioeconomic factors," he said.
The agreement to drop the consent decree, however, which is to be made final next June, will mean the state no longer has the ACLU and the federal courts watching how it runs its prisons.
"We now know a lot more about how to operate the prisons, and we have the recognition that we will do so," Margery Bronster, state attorney general, said yesterday.
The consent decree, entered into 11 years ago when the state and the ACLU were about to go to court on a series of civil-rights abuse allegations, required the state to pay for ACLU monitoring and puts limits on the number of prisoners at the main Oahu facility and the women's prison at Olomana.
"There has been incremental progress," Vannessa Chong, ACLU director, said.
"We have been breathing down their neck."
The concern now shifts to the prison's portion of Cayetano's planned request for $1 billion in new construction money. In that is $10 million for expanded prison construction that will result in 1,000 new prison spaces.
The effort to improve the system won praise yesterday from Sen. Matt Matsunaga, co-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
"The greatest challenge has been the lack of prison space," he said.
But Matsunaga, like Bronstein, warned that the state must still deal with the root causes of criminal behavior.
"We need education and prevention, and we need to be more creative in how we deal with offenders," Matsunaga said.