Senate Standing Committee on Public Safety and Military Affairs

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Senate Committee on Public Safety and Military Affairs. Today is January 22, 2025, and we are in Conference Room 225. This is an informational briefing and is also being streamed online on YouTube. Just a few housekeeping items. There will be no testimony at this time.

The content, including the hearing notice and briefing materials, can be found on the Hawaii State Legislature's website. And this is our first committee hearing of the year. So, welcome everyone and thank you to those that are in the audience here for your participation today.

With us today we have Senator Rhoads, who's a member on the Public Safety and Military Affairs Committee, and I believe Vice Chair Wakai should be joining us shortly.

Today's hearing, the purpose of this informational briefing is to discuss the following the Hawaii Correctional System Oversight Commission Staffing Report January 2025, and the Hawaii Correctional System Oversight Commission Annual Report 2024. And we have two agencies with us today. We're going to reverse the order so that it's a little easier.

So first we're going to have the Hawaii Correctional System Oversight Commission to go first, followed by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, DCR. And members, and for those watching here or on YouTube, we've asked the departments to present a 20-minute presentation.

And then during the transition, we can open it up for questions and answers throughout the presentation or at the end. With that, from the Oversight Commission, we have Coordinator Kristen Johnson and Chairman Mark Patterson. So, if you could just introduce yourself, please.

Aloha. My name is Mark Patterson, Chair of the Hawaii Correctional System Oversight Commission. Good to be here.

Aloha. My name is Kristin Johnson. I'm the Oversight Coordinator of the Hawaii Correctional System Oversight Commission.

Thank you. Before we continue, I do want to recognize newly elected Rep. Garner Shimizu, who's in the audience with us today. Aloha. Please continue.

Great. Well, thank you so much for inviting us. We're really excited to talk about our work in the past year and also our newest report, which was just uploaded to our website today. So, it's very fresh. So very briefly, I just want to go over our 2024 annual report.

This will be a very brief presentation because I want to make sure that the majority of our time is spent on the staffing report. So, in the 2024 report, we really went over the history of the commission, our current commissioners and current staff.

And for those of you who may not be aware, the commission is a relatively new entity. The law was passed in 2019 to create the commission. The commissioner started meeting in January of 2020 and continued to meet since then, but due to COVID and other factors, funding wasn't released until 2022.

So, the office itself wasn't open until July 2022, when I started. And that's when the work really began in earnest. And we started putting out monthly annual reports and facility specific reports. So, on our commission we have Mark Patterson, Mark Browning, Ronnie Barra, Martha Tornay and Mike Town.

And each of the commissioners are chosen by different entities of state. The governor, chief justice, house speaker, and also the senate president. So, the power and duties of the commission can kind of be broken into four pieces. So, we investigate, we set population limits, we monitor and oversee the reentry system.

And then there's this other specific part about facilitating a correctional system transition to a rehabilitative and therapeutic model. So that's what we focus all of our work on is really that transition piece. So as far as oversight and public accountability, in the last year we've had 18 public meetings.

11 of those were monthly meetings and six of those were House Concurrent Resolution 23 meetings. And then we had one community input meeting for public reporting. Last year we reported on 12 deaths in custody. We also did 20 public reports. 12 of those were the monthly reports and eight were facility specific reports.

We conducted over 33 correctional facility visits. And the importance of these visits is that we go in and we talk to staff, we talk to people in custody to really get a better understanding of what is actually happening in the facilities. On the ground level, we also have some notable tours.

We went to the Going Home Hawaii Reentry Housing, Halawa and Waiawa's Resource Fairs, Halawa's Annual Commencement Celebration, and also the Makahiki at Saguaro. Last year, the commission published over 60 facility specific recommendations and two system wide recommendations. The system wide recommendations are recommendations where we recognize the director can't change everything and not everything's in his power.

But it's really encouraging the director to work with different entities of the state to make that change within the system. We also attended various local and national conferences.

We attended the Justice Innovation Summit, the Reckoning with Restorative justice, the Breaking Cycle Symposium Updates, Roundtables and Community Meetings, the Wellness and Resilience Summit, and the Hawaii Island Sequential Intercept Event.

And then on the national level, we've attended Vera Institute Webinars, and also the 2024 Annual Conference of the National Association of Civilian of Law Enforcement, and then also the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab Conference, which really, really focused on deaths in custody.

And I bring those up because There is a specific part of our mandate where it really talks about, you know, having updated education and information regarding not only what's going on in your state, but what's going on across the country. Our strategic plan is embedded in our annual report. That is a living, breathing document.

We update it frequently. And that plan has four strategic priorities that are broken into oversight, rehabilitation, population limits, and reentry. All of those are very thoroughly talked about in the report. And then lastly, we have our legislative priorities.

So, we talked about funding and how we are officially a part of the state budget, which is very exciting for us. We also talked about how we have been requesting revisions to 353L, which is the commission's statute.

And really what we're looking to do is increase the oversight coordinator term from two years to four years, among a couple other things. And then lastly, we have a little bit about the HCR 23 task force. The reason why is because the commission was actually asked to chair that task force.

And so, we included all that information on our website and the annual report. So that is it for the annual report. And so, with chair's permission, I can move.

Members, if you're okay, we'll allow the commissioner oversight to continue with the staffing report, and we can ask questions at the end.

Great. All right. The moment we've all been waiting for. So, the Correctional Staff Survey Findings and recommendations report was a massive report that we took on. It took us over a year to get this project done.

And we took it on because as we toured the jails and prisons and we talked to the staff, we consistently heard about how difficult it is to work in those environments and all the different factors that make it difficult.

And we really wanted to know the staff that not only do we hear you, we really want to work with you to make the change that you need to do your job and make your job more impactful for the incarcerated population.

So, with that, we really wanted to uplift their voices and their experiences, and that's what this report is all about. So, first, when thinking about this report, we really had to focus on our research methods. And ultimately, we decided that a written survey was the best way to capture the measurable impacts of what people were going through.

So, we chose a survey that was created by the Urban Institute's Prison Research and Innovation Initiative, which was successfully used and distributed in facilities throughout Vermont, Delaware, Iowa, Missouri, and Colorado.

We then met with both the unions and also DCR leadership to go through the survey, make sure there weren't any concerns, make sure everybody was on the same page. So, then we went facility to facility, literally post to post to distribute and collect those surveys. And that was a huge effort that.

I do want to acknowledge Director Tommy Johnson for supporting us in that. If he didn't allow people to take this on their post, I don't think that we would have gotten much of a response. So I really appreciate the department's support. And the survey was also available online. We then conducted talk stories in every correctional facility.

These were very long days as we made sure to hit all three shifts. And then lastly, we finished with a report which is in front of you today that encompasses the survey findings, the talk story findings, and then applicable recommendations.

And the primary objective for this report was to one, gain a deeper understanding of the corrections environment and the complexity the staff are facing. Two, enhanced data collection to support transparency and accountability. And three, offer recommendations directly from corrections staff on how to best improve and support working conditions in Hawaii's jails and prisons.

So in the background there, you can actually see a small part of the survey. This survey was a behemoth. It was 106 questions and it was divided into eight sections. So we looked at job satisfaction downtown, which is really referring to the department's leadership suite.

So, anyone above the wardens, really workplace culture, which is really focusing more inside of the jails and prisons, staff health, purpose of incarceration, facility conditions, staff incarcerated people interactions, and then correctional practices and sanctions. That's really looking at whether or not people feel that our current system is more rehabilitative or more punitive.

So, we found that our distribution methods were extremely effective. 771 staff members took the survey, the highest being 73% of staff at Kulani and the lowest being 42% at Halawa, which is still really good. We're very proud of those numbers.

After all the surveys were collected, the Criminal Justice Research Institute helped us in the data collection to analyze and gain insights from the survey responses. And on the side there, that's a breakdown of our key findings. What we found was the staff are feeling a total disconnect between themselves and the leadership of the department.

We found that there was a lack of engagement and transparency and not being included on decision making or operational decisions. And we found that staff were citing unsustainable working conditions, including mandatory overtime, having insufficient staff and not having enough wellness resources. We found that collectively all of those findings were impacting staff's health and well-being.

60% of staff developed a serious health condition due to job stress. Over 60% noted a lack of wellness support, and over 75% felt emotionally drained. However, despite all of this, staff did express having a commitment to respectful and supportive interactions of people in custody, though they also mentioned limited resources have hindered efforts towards true rehabilitative efforts.

And lastly, we saw some notable differences between the jail and prison staff which we'll actually cover on the next slide. So, looking at the distinction between jails and prisons, the overall takeaway is that jails have more hazardous and critical conditions, staffing shortages, higher turnover rates, mandatory overtime and work schedules that create significant conflicts at home in comparison to prisons. Prisons do have safety concerns as well, but and prevalent turnover, but it's less severe. Jails also have alarmingly higher rates of depression, insomnia, PTSD, diabetes and heart disease in comparison to the prisons. Jail staff also reported having serious thoughts of suicide twice as often as the prison staff.

Jails reported having poorer food quality, lack of natural light, inadequate cleanliness, subpar living conditions for incarcerated individuals, and less alternatives to segregation in comparison to the prisons. Jail staff often described their work as doing time as well, and prison conditions were also problematic, but again just not as severe as the jails.

This shows an urgent need to address staffing, safety and health crises in the jails where conditions are remarkably worse and both systems require leadership, engagement and systemic improvements to ensure sustainability and well-being for staff and individuals in custody.

So, then we looked at the distinctions between uniform staff and civilian staff, and the big takeaways here is that uniformed staff have less enthusiasm for work, felt less appreciated by leadership, and felt less support in their career goals as compared to civilian staff.

Uniform staff were also more likely to change jobs if given the chance, and both groups expressed concern regarding communication and inclusiveness from downtown leadership. Uniform staff were less satisfied with downtown's communication of a clear vision for the department and respect for input.

In comparison to civilian staff, although uniformed staff reported more professional growth opportunities, they reported less leadership support, facility safety and employee wellness in comparison to civilization. Civilian staff were more optimistic about rehabilitation and helping people make positive changes, and they were less likely to describe their job as doing time as well in comparison to uniform staff.

And although the health conditions in most areas were worse than uniform staff in comparison to civilian staff, which is what we anticipated. I did want to highlight the civilians had developed more anxiety and depression than uniform staff, and diabetes was about the same for the two groups.

I thought that was really interesting and I also want to note that those questions say specifically "Since I started working in corrections, I've developed" acts so it wasn't before. So now we can shift into the talk stories.

So, we took all of the survey responses, divvied them up facility by facility, and then took those facility specific responses into each jail or prison. We asked staff if their responses felt right and if they agreed on them. And then we went section by section and asked for more insights and also recommendations.

So, what you see on these slides are the themes from each facility. Every facility is different and had their own priorities. HCCC was extremely concerned about the conditions of the facility, and they had the most empathy for people in custody.

If when you go over the acronyms, I know most of us are familiar with it, but can you describe what the acronyms mean?

Yes. So yeah, HCCC is the Hawaii Community Correctional Center. KCCC is Kauai. So, the Kauai Jail, they were most concerned. They had the worst morale in the state, bar none. Staff really didn't even want to talk to us, they were so burned out. They talked about mandatory overtime the most and also working multiple posts.

So, one individual working two or three posts. The Maui Community Correctional Center was most concerned about training and also supportive communication from top down. The Oahu Community Correctional Center was mostly concerned about staff not coming to work. And they also talked a lot about not being heard or feeling valued. And they talked a lot about burnout.

Halava, which is HCF, talked about staff not coming to work. And they wanted the most accountability for this by far. They were pretty upset about that. KCF is the Kulani Correctional Facility on the Big Island. They're mostly concerned about their facility leadership who has since retired.

They're also concerned about Kulani being a really restrictive facility that's a minimum level facility. And they talked about a lack of programs, a lack of volunteers being allowed to come into the facility to help people, custody, a lack of movement and things of that nature.

WCCC, which is our Women's Community Correctional Center, was mostly concerned about their facility leadership and also, they felt a real lack of preparation for the incoming jail population. And then WCCC, which is Waiava, our minimum facility on Oahu, they had no concerns at all.

They just wanted to offer recommendations to help out other facilities, which is really nice. So, with that we jump into recommendations, and I just again want to, I want to emphasize that every one of these recommendations came from the staff. I did not write any of these. We pulled all of these from the talk stories.

We had many, many pages of notes from those talk stories and these are the consistent trends that we are seeing across the board. So, we split these up into eight different sections. In training, we recommended comprehensive and consistent training for all staff.

So again, top down and that should include leadership, communication, and empathy training and also mental health and crisis intervention training. For communication, staff really want to be included in the decision-making process, especially for issues that impact them directly. We also recommended regular and transparent communication and to improve internal communication within the facilities themselves.

For trust, we recommended consistent and fair policies across the board and that those policies be followed. We also recommended regular leadership engagement and so this is not just from downtown, but also within the facility. And also recommended more involvement again staff involvement in decision making.

For compensation and benefits, we recommended to increase base pay and also bonuses and improve and expand uniform allowance to support professionalism. I know that one seems really small, but every facility had brought up the uniform allowances and how their uniforms rip and they're very expensive to replace.

That was not one that I anticipated coming up, but that was a big issue for staff. And then also ensure accurate and timely payments. Staff talked about how sometimes payments can be really delayed and when they go to fix, it can take months to fix. Under recruitment and retention, we recommend to shorten the hiring process.

We also recommended to revise the psychological evaluation. At least at the time of these talk stories, there was one individual doing all evaluations for every incoming staff member. And staff talked about how a lot of 90-day hires were denied even though they were really good workers inside the facilities.

We also recommended to enhance training and support under overtime, which is clearly our biggest section.

We recommended to limit burnout, to create fair overtime distribution, to create incentives for attendance, to implement 12-hour shifts, to reevaluate the staffing plans and posts, to enhance policies for time off and overtime distribution, to hire more staff and streamline the hiring process, to improve scheduling flexibility and to implement voluntary overtime program.

Under staff and health wellness, we recommended mental health support, implementing physical wellness resources and also creating a work life balance. And then under concerns regarding incarceration, we recommended to ensure consistent transfers and access to programs for people in custody. We recommended to enhance mental health and rehabilitative services and with that to also expand rehabilitative and therapeutic programming.

So, in conclusion, if we wanted to take four large takeaways from this report, I think that when you look at enhanced training and support, it's important to provide standardized, consistent training, especially in crisis intervention and mental health care for both new hires and leadership.

Under improved communication and inclusion, it's important to establish regular briefings and direct engagement from central leadership to build trust and transparency. Under increased compensation and benefits, it's important to adjust pay scales, add bonuses and increase uniform allowances to reflect job demands and encourage retention. And our focus, staff wellness initiatives, it's important to expand mental health resources, reduce mandatory overtime and promote work life balance to support long term staff health and staff morale. With that said, you know, I really, I just wanted to thank all of the corrections staff who participated in this.

It really meant a lot to us to hear from so many staff and hear their personal stories and for them to open up to us in such a way. We're really excited about this report, and we hope that it makes some changes. So, thank you all so much for allowing us to present to you today.

Thank you, Coordinator Johnson and Chair Patterson and to you and your team for your hard work in coming up with these survey results and the annual report. Before I begin and open up to questions, I'd like to recognize Senator Carol Fukunaga, who's with us here today. And in the audience, we have Representative Kim Koko Iwamoto. Welcome.

What's that? Oh, yeah, I did before you came here. Yeah. Members, questions? Annual Report and Staffing Report to Commission on Oversight. Yes, Senator Fukunaga.

This is such a comprehensive overview and very helpful in terms of, you know, identifying many of the areas of concern. In your follow up, have you had opportunities to discuss the report and its recommendations with the department leadership as well as some of the advocates?

Because this seems to be really a good opportunity to, you know, kind of create collaborative solutions in a way that potentially would benefit not only the department leadership, but many of the stakeholders who have been advocating for improvements for a long time.

Yeah, yeah, I so appreciate you bringing up that question. So, I'll start with the department level before shifting into community. So, we have really tried to keep the department involved in this process without overbearing them since day one. And so, you know, we made sure to meet with department leadership.

And again, thank you all for meeting with us and working collaboratively. We made sure to meet with them about the survey within itself. Then once we got all of the responses, we met with them as to what we were seeing throughout the trends.

We met with them after the talk stories and also shared all of our talk story notes. It was a lot.

It was a lot to go through, but we wanted to be as transparent as possible so that, you know, also give the department a chance that if they wanted to start taking action or if they could start taking action on any of this, that they had the opportunity to do that. For the recommendations, we really, really, really wanted to stand true to having those recommendations come directly from the staff who are doing the job.

And so although we've heard different recommendations from different entities for this report, at least we really wanted it to be specific, you know, coming from the corrections staff in the jails and prisons. And then on the community side, transparently, not yet, we just posted it on our website today. Oh, I'm sorry. I should have added.

In the same way that we met with the department with those different pieces, we also met with the unions. And so HGEA and UPW. Thank you. But, yeah, but we're always open to feedback in any work that we do.

Okay. It's not entirely clear to what extent, you know, your discussions with the department have also opened the door to their inclusion and participation with the unions and other advocacy stakeholders that have pretty much talked very specifically about many of the findings that you have outlined in the report. So perhaps it's too early.

The report just came out. But I would hope that it provides a neutral starting point for everyone to engage and move forward in a way that actually helps build that communication, trust and working together towards solutions.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's our goal, too. We have made ourselves available to UPW specifically and also the department, if they wanted to meet collectively to talk about this or any of the recommendations in there.

Also note that any of the recommendations that we put out, we always follow up to see if the department plans to take them on or if they'd rather not. Wherever they are in that process, we always follow up just to check in. So, we'll be doing that as well.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comprehensive report. I know we've been talking about this survey for a little over a year, and I'm glad that the results finally came out.

It's not all positive, obviously, but I want to focus on something good that's in this report, and that is at WC - the Women's Correctional Facility, since that's the only one, apparently, that people seem to be happy to go to work.

WCF is Waiaba.

I apologize. Waiawa Correctional Facility. What is it that's going on there that is so uniquely different than other locations? What is it that's feeding the good staff morale at that location?

Warden Ornelas is the warden at the Waiaba Correctional Facility 1:he was born and raised in Waiaba. He's a correctional officer that eventually became the captain, chief of security, and he eventually became the warden. He's very engaging. He's the officer's leader, so he can speak to all levels of these correctional officers. They can speak to him.

So, he has open communications with them, and they have bought into his vision and his mission. Right. Which is key to have the correctional force on your side. It's also a minimum-security facility, so he's dealing with reentry, and all the individuals that are coming to him know that they're about to go out.

So, they're very willing to participate in all the programs that he has to offer in the vocational training. It's also a substance abuse program. And so, I think there is a lot of support for the warden and his vision by his entire staff that he has had less issues than the other facilities based on their mission.

So, the warden is probably the key individual at all of these locations as to how the communication and all the trouble spots can be resolved. So, we improve the training and empathy of the wardens, and that's a good opportunity for us to kind of trickle down to the rank-and-file ACO.

Yeah, I think that leadership throughout the correctional facilities make a massive impact, and so not just the warden, but also the chief of security. You know, if you have somebody who's continuously talking down to you or belittling you or, you know, berating you, that doesn't make you want to come to work.

It doesn't make you want to be engaged. And so, what we were seeing is that, you know, at the Maui Community Correctional center, they loved their warden. We got some of the highest regards about the warden there. So that's amazing.

But it was actually that middle management that was causing so much tension that people just were desperate for communication training specifically. They were like, "I just want to be spoken to, like, I'm a human being," you know, and so it was really interesting. But Mark's right.

At Waiava, they really, really create an environment there where there's so much communication, so much teamwork. Everybody knows what everybody else is doing. The warden walks the facility consistently. So, yeah, we were really impressed.

I see that many of these problems are based on too few guards guarding too many inmates. Right. Just under stress that causes. But it's also well known that the overtime issues, a lot of it is due to the way that the ACOs game the system. Right. They use. They call in sick, they talk to their pal.

Can you cover me? Then you call in sick and I'm going to cover for you. And then there's that federal leave thing that they took to take advantage of. So how much of some of the stress that is embodied in your report is due to a certain level of responsibility to the to the ACOs themselves. Right.

If they're over there working with their neighbor guard to like calling in sick so I can take advantage of overtime, then not all of it is Tommy Johnson and his crew. Some of it is just your ranking file guys who know how to game the system, and they should police their own.

How much of that responsibility should be placed on the guards themselves for the stress that they see because they're not going to rat out their neighboring guard who they know is gaming the system.

You know, if you notice the comments from Halava, I forgot where it was, wanted the most accountability for this. So, one of the officers said, "I work three days a week, I call in sick on my Friday, I take my two days off, I call in sick on my Monday, and then I work 16,16,10." Right.

"I do it because I can." It's said straight up to us. "I do it because I can, because I know nobody's going to do anything." So that's why a lot of that conversation in Halava was they were talking about we just need more accountability.

People need to be afraid to do that or they're going to lose their job or something. Because you're protecting the ones that are abusing and the ones that are trying to do the best they can, they're just going to fall in line because nothing's happening to the ones who are abusing.

So how do we work together with the union and the department to figure out how do we have more accountability for the individuals that are playing the system? And you're right, but it did come up. Very frankly, I do it because I can.

And so, where does that leave us in terms of labor issues in our discussions with union and how do we. How do you help us solve the problem with your members? You're supposed to be providing the service for the state and helping keep the public safe.

But your work, your staff are not coming, your members are not coming to work. Yeah, that's a higher-level conversation.

Any questions? The Chair has a few. And follow up to Vice Chairman Kai's question on staffing and members showing up for work in your survey results. I know Halawa, you know, wanted more accountability with their ACO and members. I know in the past there's been proposed bills on cash out program.

There's been suggestions on a merit-based program. Do you feel that that's more sort of a Department role, that DCR can already do that within their rules and procedures, or is that something that we as a Legislature, something that we have to sort of create?

I think it's a legislative policy that needs to be created. How do you bring the union on life? Yeah, that's really, to me, you know, as long as I've been in corrections in Hawaii, it's really that constant battle of they're going to represent everybody no matter what.

Where you have other unions in the state, be it Teamsters or construction or whatever, if they don't abide by the union rules, they won't represent them. Yeah.

So how do we find that thin line for our state correctional unions to say, hey, they're not following the rules that you said you promised the state that you're providing the service. How do we hold them accountable for it? How do we hold you accountable? You have to take accountability as well. Right. Because you're.

We're the, we're the client. That's how I feel. We're the client and you're supposed to be providing this service for us. So where, where is, where is the middle point where you folks take ownership of your own membership. Yeah. And give us the best that you have.

Thank you. Some other questions I have is I know on page 26 of your report talked about other states using similar surveys, for example, Vermont and Colorado. Was there something that you compared to those states? I know they're a little different.

I know. So that was the intention of using a survey that other states have utilized. It really just came down to staff capacity. When we looked at the priorities of what we could put in the report and what we could really focus on, we wanted to focus on the jail and prison distinctions, the civilian staff, first uniform staff. So that hasn't been something I've been able to really dig into, but I'd be more than happy to take a closer look.

And just to be clear, so the public and the Committee does know is that this, this survey was voluntary.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it was absolutely voluntary. And. And it was completely confidential.

Got it. I know. Even in your report, do you also have in Your recommendations. Do you have budgetary recommendations that also go with your recommend, your recommended items, or is that something you're still formulating?

Yeah, so we didn't. So some of the recommendations, for example, talk about staff pay, like the base pay.

So we didn't go into payment-specific budgetary recommendations for the Legislature because we kind of thought the Department, if they wanted to take that on, that would be their role of figuring out what that looks like, where it would be, and then making that request.

And then the only other question I have is, I know we've done this, and this was a success, and it revealed a lot of things. Will the Commission oversight be looking to do future surveys? And if it's future surveys, will it be General or more targeted to different facilities?

Oh, you kill me. So I have to ask. So it's funny you say that during the talk stories. I couldn't believe it. But people were asking if this could be an annual survey. And I was like, really? You really want to do this again? And we joked with them because it took a lot.

I mean, it took so much work. And again, I want to acknowledge Dr. Aaron Harbinson in the back here with CJRI, who really helped us with the data collection. We are more than happy to look at doing this transparently. We will need more staff, but we're requesting more staff this year. And so hopefully that would be something.

The Legislature about a year.

Over a year. Yeah.

And to Senator Fukunaga's point, you know, this provides us a baseline. And so I think if we were to sort of check in and do a progress and this were annual, this is something we could work towards to see if there are trends.

Yeah, they're going in different directions based on some themes and suggestions that you do see.

Yeah, agreed. Agreed.

Members, any other questions? Senator Fukunaga?

I think one point that, you know, kind of the interest in having this done annually becomes almost a way of enabling a lot of the staff to participate in identifying their top priorities, you know, for recommendations, action.

So say if we know that we have limited resources and, you know, they have staff pay, they have different areas of concern, you know, by doing an annual survey, I think one of the subsequent questions could be, what do you think is the most important thing that we should ask the Legislature to help us take action on?

Because I think, you know, the concerns about pay, about, you know, overtime, burnout conditions, mental health, and all of those cut across so many different categories of government service. I think if the employees are also involved in helping to Tailor what the priorities might be. Then I think it gives them a common goal.

Working together with leadership to be able to achieve, you know, whether it's the better pay, you know, step one, step two, step three. Then they feel like they are really participating in that collaborative trust building process. And so. Thank you.

This survey has opened the door, I think for many of the staff to feel like they can methodically begin to participate with their leadership in ways that will go far beyond what they may have initially thought. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Members, any other questions? Senator Rhoades, do you have any questions? Sure. While we have the Commission and oversight here. Okay. If not, thank you so much. And we may call you at the end if there are further follow-up questions.

Yeah, thank you so much.

The Next Department that we'll call up is the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. DCR Director Johnson and Director, if you can identify yourself. And then if you want to, I know you have staff Members here if you want to introduce them as well. Sure.

Okay. Good afternoon. Chair Elefante, Vice Chair Wakai and Members of the Committee. I'm Tommy Johnson, the Director of Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. I brought two of my staff members along with me. First is my Deputy Director for Rehabilitation Programs and Services, Santa Munoz. And then I also brought our Deputy Director for Administration, Melanie Martin.

Thank you.

I just have some comments to read and then I would like to provide some information as to the main four things that were left up on the conclusion because we did do some things proactively and I'd like to explain that to the community. First, the Department of Corrections Rehabilitation.

Thanks to Committee leadership for scheduling this informational briefing to discuss the Hawaii Correctional Systems Oversight Commission's reports on staffing and its annual report. The DCR appreciates the Commission and its staff for their efforts in completing both reports.

The Commission reports highlight DCR's long standing challenges in many areas which we continue to be committed to systematically and methodically addressing.

We are committed to improving operations, morale and provide for a safer and more humane environment for those in our custody and care and a better working environment for our dedicated staff that is more conducive to wanting them to come to work and and to thrive in their employment with the Department.

The Commission's 272 annual report for 2024 is really 329 pages. When you add all of the attachments in part provides information on the eight correctional facilities which includes recommendations for each facility.

It should be noted that DCR is not surprised by most of the recommendations they are related to long standing areas of concern where funding has been requested but not provided. There are other areas discussed that although the DCR does not disagree, those recommendations fall outside the DCR's purview.

As the Coordinator mentioned earlier, however, we remain committed to working with the Commission, the Administration, the Legislature and the appropriate stakeholders to address these issues as well.

In addition to the recommendations made by the Commission, the DCR is particularly interested in and requests additional information regarding the Commission's efforts to establish maximum inmate population limits for each correctional facility, including the Commission's efforts to formulate policies and procedures to prevent the inmate population from exceeding the capacity.

For each correctional facility, the DCR must take all persons ordered to our custody and care by the courts, including pretrial detainees, petty misdemeanants, misdemeanants, sentence felons and probation violators.

In addition, the DCR is also required to take all persons arrested on the strength of the warrant issued by the Hawaii Paroling Authority as it relates to alleged violations of the Terms and Conditions of parole.

The DCR only has authority over approximately 5% of the current pretrial and inmate population of almost 3,800, which equates to about 190 individuals in our custody and care.

Without the Commission establishing maximum inmate population limits agreed to by the courts and the prosecutors, there is very little the DCR can do to address severe chronic overcrowding that has plagued our jails for decades.

With respect to the Commission's report on staffing finding the recommendations, the DCR fully encouraged, as the Coordinator mentioned, and supported the Commission's efforts and provided unfettered access to the eight correctional facilities during their 38 hour shifts, including access to the inmates housed out of state at the Saguaro Correctional Facility in Eloy, Arizona.

As you know, the Commission's report is thorough and addresses several areas, including but not limited to the leadership, communication, workplace conditions, health and wellness, interactions with the incarcerated individuals, differentiation between the jails and prison staff, etc.

The Department faces long-standing challenges in each area, and we are committed to improving from the top down and the bottom up. But to do so we require sustained resources will be necessary, some of which are included in the Governor's Executive budget.

Those not included in the budget will be requested next year and during the next biennium budget cycle. The Director as the Director of the Department of Corrections Rehabilitation, I am very concerned with staffing shortages due to due in part to sick leave and family medical leave abuses by staff.

I am concerned about staff health concerns and both the living Conditions of those in our custody and care and the working conditions of our uniform and non uniform staff. The working conditions at our aging, outdated and deteriorating facilities has been described by some as doing time.

As the coordinator mentioned earlier, as a state we must and can do better by ensuring our unified correctional system, which is one of five in a nation, is adequately funded.

It is important to remember DCR correctional facilities operate 247365 and never close, and we never shut our doors, which places huge strains on our staff facility infrastructure such as water, sewer, electrical, and the furnishings. For now, that is all I have. Subject to the questions from the Committee.

I would like to say that we do work well with the Commission. We don't always agree, but I think we do agree that there are major issues we need to address. A lot of them long standing, and some of them are outside of our authority. But we're willing to work with those entities with your permission.

As the Commission mentioned, they mentioned four in their conclusion. The last slide up, they mentioned four areas, enhanced training and support. So I'd like to go over those four real quickly. So what we did was we pulled all of the training sergeants out of the facilities and put them centrally with our training services division.

What we found was that when the wardens were short staffed, they were pulling the training sergeants off the line and putting them into ACO positions where they were manning a post. So we fell behind in training by centralizing the Acos to tsd.

We then could put together a training strike package and send multiple training sergeants to a facility on every shift to provide the training that the ACOs need. There's a number of annual training requirements such as use of force, bloodborne pathogens that our healthcare staff provide, OC spray, defensive tactics, first aid.

So we believe by centralizing the training staff, we will have a better outcome with respect to the training. And then the wardens can't pull them off of their duties.

Now that's not a popular thing to do, but it's something we had to do to make sure we can catch up on our training with respect to number two, improved communication. So I previously ordered all the wardens, chiefs of security, deputy wardens for the two larger facilities and the watch commanders to get off their butts.

And every shift that they're on, walk the facility. The larger facilities like OCCC and Halawa, break it down to a grid square. Whereas the four leadership folks that are there, the warden, deputy warden, chief of security and the watch commander each pick a grid square and they walk that in an eight hour period and then they switch it up the next day.

So I think we have to do a better job because I need to go back and check to make sure they're actually doing it. Because I wanted to improve the communications.

I wanted them to actually go in and don't just sign the book at the housing unit, talk to the staff, talk to the inmates, get the temperature of that particular housing to see if there are problems and then find out from the staff. Now, I can tell you from going to the fields myself on the weekends and evenings, I do get an earful, but that's what we're there for.

We need to listen to the staff and take into consideration some of the things they're saying because they're the folks on the ground who are doing the work, who are working with the inmates. I ordered my staff to set up quarterly talk story sessions with the inmate, with our staff.

So how we plan to do that is I will record a talk story session and we will hold it at a particular time. We'll take questions, we'll record it put. But then we'll provide it available for the staff who aren't on shift and they can email or provide input to that talk story session.

Now that'll be myself and the leadership team. We do regular facility visits and with respect to the comments of OCCC and the Halawa about wanting staff to come to work. So I want to make it clear that there is.

We have dedicated ACOs who come to work day in and day out, but we do have some hardcore folks who are abusing sick leave and who are abusing the Family Medical Leave Act. We have met with Kalani Warner, the head of upw, twice last year with he and his chief union stewards.

And we asked him, I recently wrote to him and asked him, where can they provide us with what's called the new attendant program.

We had a, an MOU in place with them that addressed the sick leave issue, that the punishment for ACOs not coming to work was that they had to build up time and if they didn't build up the appropriate amount of time, then they were sanctioned. A vocal minority of ACOs didn't want that, so he didn't renew that.

Last year we met with him to ask him to reinstitute it. He said he wouldn't. So I wrote to him and asked him now, okay, so where's the union's plan to deal with the new attendants? We have, I have yet to hear from him, but to be honest with You.

I just wrote that letter to him about a week and a half ago. So I'm going to give him 30 days and I'll follow up with him.

Right now the only thing we have is what's called 3811 in the contract, which means if somebody doesn't come to work, it's strictly punitive and the contract gives us no leeway. When they have a certain amount of absences in a certain amount of time and they're unexcused absences, then we have to terminate them.

One of the issues we have is that even though we follow the contract to the letter, the UPW files a grievance for that particular person that's affecting morale because the members are saying, hey, why are you taking up for this guy? This guy's not coming to work. He's causing me to stay for overtime.

But you're defending this person. So that's one of the issues, one of the concerns we have, but we'll continue to try to work with Kalani Warner and the staff are frustrated because they see that there are abuses in the system. And as the, the Commission chairperson mentioned, ACOs will tell you, I can do it because I can.

We got to close those loops in the contract and we also have to reward those folks who come to work. One of the major concerns with the ACOs is the pay. So an ACO recruit makes about $5,355 per month.

Once they finish their probationary period after nine months, the salary goes to about $5,798 per month, which is $69,576. But with the cost of living here, you can't even buy an apartment. You can only rent for that. Even a sergeant, once a person makes sergeant, the salary goes from 69,576 to only 82,248.

So one of the issues that happened in the 90s that affected the ACO pay, and I know at the time because I was a youth corrections officer, is that UPW voluntarily gave up the step movements for corrections officers for a one time payment of about $5,600 to the ACOs.

At that time, the older ACOs didn't want it, the younger ACOs did. So the older ACOs who had more time got voted down. But the older Acos was thinking with the step movements, it affects their pay and it affects their retirement, where the younger folks didn't understand that, but they won out. So some of the things we did to recommend pay increases for the Acos is that I sent proposals to deherd to one, return the step movements to the Acos.

It's not fair for someone who's just come out of the academy after nine months and somebody who's been on the floor for 20 years to make the same amount of money, because this person has the experience and should make money. And the step movements would take care of that.

I propose hiring bonuses for ACOs where they receive half of the bonus within 30 days of completing the training, and then they would receive the other half of the bonus within 30 days of completing their initial probationary period of nine months.

And if they failed to complete either of those, we would recoup the money back through some appropriated method. I also provided a proposal where we offered a longevity pay raise, a longevity bonus to ACOs coming to work who had 10152025 years of service, 30 years of service.

But that is tied to them coming to work 80% of the time. So let me explain why I use 80% of the time. The state gets 100. Each civil service employee gets 168 days of vacation, 168 days of vacation, 168 hours of vacation a year, and 168 hours of sick leave a year, plus nine paid holidays.

That's almost two and a half months off. If they just earned and burned everything, if they came to work for at least 10 months a year, then they would get the lower end of the bonus, but it's tied to their regular shift, not the overtime shift, because that would address the abuse issue. And then if they came to work 90% of the time, then they would then receive a higher amount of the bonus.

One of the proposals that is within my authority is if someone is coming to work 90% of the time, they build up their vacation leave, providing we have the resources on the first come, first serve basis, then my proposal would have been to allow them to cash in two weeks of vacation every year beginning about the middle of October till about the beginning of December, so that they would get that check right before Christmas and can address things to their families.

Another thing we did was we shortened the academy from 11 weeks to eight weeks because we found that folks on neighbor islands didn't want to leave their families, particularly younger ACO recruits, for 11 weeks. So we shortened the academy from 11 weeks to eight weeks, and they would complete the three weeks during the initial probationary period at the facilities.

Another thing we did is we did a cost benefit analysis to look at how many ACO recruits would it take for us to balance out by taking the academy to the neighbor islands, we figured out that if we had at least six applicants from the neighbor islands, we would take the academy to them and that would be cheaper than putting up in a pagoda hotel and paying per diem for eight weeks.

We would send two instructors there to provide classes to them and fly the instructors back home every weekend. So that covers number three. What we did proactive for number three for number four, staff wellness. We did ask for and receive last year money to provide trauma informed care to Acos online with Wimmer Community College.

This year in the budget we asked for funding to do the same for nonuniform staff and it is included in the Governor's Executive budget. Now we've done a lot in a little bit of time, but there's still a lot more to be done as you saw from the reports.

And we're willing to work with the Commission, the Administration and Legislature to address those issues and many many other long standing issues for Department.

Thank you Director, Members questions. Senator Rhoads.

Thanks. Thanks for being here. With regard to the maximum number of inmates you're supposed to have in the various facilities, you do have a number that is considered sort of the. What's supposed to be the maximum figure, correct?

Yeah. So we have, we have a facility design capacity and operational capacity.

Okay, those aren't the same. Those are.

No. So the design capacity is ideal. The operational capacity means you can increase it by converting either including three inmates to a cell or converting other space to some type of dormitory or some type of cell space. So I'm assuming you're over operational capacity as well. We are at some facilities, but not at our prisons.

We are at our jails. So I'll give you an example. HCCC, which is a Hawaii Community Correctional center on the Big island, is 134.1% of its capacity of its operational capacity. Operational capacity, right. Women's Community Correctional Center is a, this shows 109 but we just opened up a 168-bed dormitory to move the females from OCCC to women.

So to be clear, the comments made in the survey about they wanted more information about the planning process. That was last year. The planning process is done. All the females have moved now to OCCC have moved from OCCC to women's and women's becomes a true hybrid prison jail.

And we added a new 168 bed dormitory, a new Administration building, a new visitation center and a new intake center as well. Well, and we also remodeled the hookipa for the work furlough program.

So you also indicate in your written testimony that you have control, only release control over only 5% of the population. Right. I guess I'm surprised it's that high. What authority do you have to release?

That is for the people that go through our work furlough programs.

Okay, so those are convicted felons. At some point you can say, okay, you've done what you need to do.

You can go now, that you can go now, but you can participate in first a work furlough program where you come back to the facility every day.

And then if you do well in that, and ideally you want them to, and they obtain employment, become more self sufficient, then you put them on extended furlough, where now they're living in the community, working in the community, and we're sending the case managers to see them and they're reporting back to facility every so often.

Okay, so even that's not. I mean, you don't have, you can't just say, we're cutting all 5% of these people loose.

Yeah, no, I cannot discharge. I don't have the ability to cut someone's sentence short.

Okay, but in terms of the furlough program, they have to go through steps before you can say, okay, you're done.

Yes, there's resocialization.

Okay, thanks. Thanks, Chair.

Thank you. Could you provide those stats to the Committee, if you don't mind?

Sure. I'll give you the. We do a weekly population report that's posted on our website, but I'll make sure we send you a copy of the latest one that I discussed here.

Great. Thank you. Members, other questions? Vice Chair. Okay.

I appreciate the fact that you're telling your wardens to get out there and temperature check what's going on on the prison campuses. But if I'm reading this survey correctly, the communication problem isn't inmates and staff to the warden, it's from the warden to you. That's where there seems to be a lack of communication.

So help us understand, once the warden gives you information about whatever good or bad is going on in their facility, does it get to you? And then what do you do in response to whatever the issue is?

Well, eventually some information will come to me, but the wardens report directly to the institution division administrator, Mr. Michael Hoffman, who in turn reports to the Deputy Director for Correctional institutions, and then that person reports to me.

But I want to make it clear we have monthly meetings with the wardens, the Deputy Director for correctional institutions and Ida have monthly meetings with the wardens to discuss issues of concern and all the wardens and the staff know that they can email me or the Deputy Director at any time with any issue and we will then address it with the chain of command.

And we, the deputies and I visit the facilities with the exception of Deputy Director Administration, the Deputy Director for Rehabilitation Program Services and the Chrysler Institution and myself, we visit the facilities all the time. We go on the weekends. Deputy Director Munoz even went by on, I think it was Christmas Day and on Thanksgiving Day as well.

Okay, well, I believe everything you said, but this survey tells us a completely different story stored that there is not this clear communication up as well as down. So I don't know how you. Where. How are we going to reconcile that?

But obviously there has to be a different approach to your style of communication which makes the ACOs feel that they're at least heard by you.

Well, I can tell you that, I mean, I'm willing to work with the Commission to figure out exactly where that disconnect is. But I can tell you, Senator, when I go to the facilities, ACOs are not shy about coming up and talking to me about issues.

I mean, some people shy away from the Director and the deputies, but the vast majority of them, I've been around long enough where they know, they come up and talk to me. I think what may be the disconnect is I can't get there on every shift, right. And I have eight facilities.

So I think the talk story sessions will help and I'll work with the Commission to figure out, okay, what is it the staff want from us to address this issue to make them feel comfortable that they do have access to the leadership. Besides just emailing us.

Mr. Patterson mentioned that, you know, the, the, your glowing facility, the Waiawa Correctional Facility. Key is having a spectacular warden over there, Mr. Arnelas. So how do we make more Arnellus in all of these other facilities? I mean, can you have him take his secret sauce and training and go to other do a warden training seminar?

I can have Sean talk to the warden, but to be honest with you, I think it's just because Sean came up through the ranks, because he grew up there and because he's been there so long, I think there's a certain level of trust developed with him and that relationships developed and it may not be as far as well developed with the other staff.

And then I think it also has to do with. It's a small minimum security facility. I think what you'll find is the smaller the facility, I think the better communication. They'll have larger facilities like the large jail, I think it's somewhat disconnected because there's so much movement, so many things, but we can do better in those areas.

So I have no problem asking Sean, Sean, what is the secret sauce? I can have him talk to the wardens at the monthly meetings that they have. And so what we do is at the monthly meetings, the wardens will have will host the other wardens at their facility.

Is KCCC larger or smaller than Waiawa?

It is. Staffing wise is smaller. The numbers wise. It has more inmates, it has more detainees, more pre sentence.

Okay. Because I mean, if Kauai is smaller than Waiawa, what you just said kind of doesn't jive, Right? Smaller is better. And I can appreciate and understand that. But Kauai's small, and that's, according to the survey, your worst facility.

I think with Kauai, the issue is, and I'll be perfectly Frank, we've had people there where a whole shift will call in sick, but a whole shift is maybe five people. And now the shift before that is stuck. And so that breeds morale issues. So we've spoken to Warden Jerry Jonah.

We got a new chief of security there, and so we're hoping that things settle down some. And with respect to Kulani, even though you didn't mention it, once the warden did retire from there, we are seeing some improvements. It is a minimum security facility, and so therefore security should be a little bit more lax. But it's also our sex offender treatment facility as well.

Members, any other questions for Director Johnson? Director, I have a few questions following up on Vice Chair Wakai for the Kauai Correctional Facility. You mentioned about your recruiting class. So is the Department actively recruiting folks on Kauai to fill positions that you need to facility?

We're actually recruiting statewide, so some of the things we've done is we've held a number of job fairs, we've gone to universities, we've started working with the military transition centers to get their folks. And providing we have six, Kauai is small.

I don't think we've ever had six candidates from Kaua'I go to our recruit class at any one time. I think Maui, we've had six. The Big island, we've probably had the most. And of course, Oahu, we clearly have the most candidates come from Oahu. So there the. I think they have 55 or six vacancies.

I may be wrong, may have a little more. But in a small facility, that still hurts. So we are doing a lot of stuff with respect to recruiting. We've done, you know, I don't know if you went to the movies this summer, but we were in the movies in every theater.

We are going to do another ad campaign. We have signs on the buses, we're trying to get signs on the, with the, with the Q code on the rail system. So we're doing a lot. I think corrections is not sexy and it's not for everybody. And I'll give you an example.

We have a lot of our psychologists leaving because they'd rather be in a clinical setting instead of a prison or jail setting. And so that's problematic for us. And so it's the same thing with ACOs. And let's face it, corrections is, it's a necessary evil, if you will. Corrections is not for everyone.

And so we've tried to increase our emergency hires so that if they come in and they're working for us and they like it, they'll go to the academy instead of we put them in the Academy and spend $100,000 on them to find out that a week, a month later they resign because it's not for them.

So your academy is now they're eight week programs. How many are you running per year?

We did. In 2023, we held three classes. We put 56 ACOs on the floor. In 2024, we increased it to six classes. We put 130,156 offices on the floor. So moving forward, we're going to have six classes a year from 25-26 and on. We had to get on top of our attrition rate.

We weren't keeping up with the attrition rate. And so we hope by, by holding the six classes, we're able to.

But to be perfectly Frank, in speaking to Director Brenna Hashimoto of De Herd, she was saying that the workforce we have, the percentage wise may not go up too much because one, people don't want to work in correction. But I mean, across the state, all the departments are short.

We're able to reduce our ACO vacancy rate from 30.4% to 24% over that year. That's including a lot of emergency hires. But we still have to do better because we have to bring the rate down to about 10% because of the sick leave abuse and the FMLA abuse by some ACOS Members.

Any other questions? You don't mind? I have a few more. Sure. I want to talk about mental health and suicides at your prisons. I know that's been brought up in the annual report. It's been in the news, you talked about the partnership you have with Windward Community College and getting people for, even for your impacted correctional officers.

Right. In the event that they do witness episodes like that. What is the Department doing to address these issues?

Well, we have two different things we're doing. One was the trauma informed care we provide to them free of charge online. And two, we have what's called a priority reporting system.

So for a priority one report, if the inmate is hurt or staff is hurt or an inmate is killed in a fight or suicide, then we refer those individuals to the REACH program for services that they want.

One thing we're adding to the notification process is that the inmate, excuse me, the staff are spoken to then and there and provided with the REACH information on the spot.

And we also ask our chaplains to come in and talk to the staff who witnessed someone get hurt or had to cut someone down from a suicide or witness someone witness a murder.

Shifting gears, I want to talk about your master plan for CIP or staffing. Does the Department have a master plan for CIP projects for all your facilities and staffing?

Well, we don't. Our master plan, the last master plan was in 2003. We've asked for money over the years. We finally have money in the current Executive budget. I think it's $10 million to update the master plan.

And that would be for what, outlook? 25 years?

That would be for 10 to 15 years. I think. I'll double check and I'll get back to you. And what it is, it's a complete comprehensive look at where we are now, where we want to be and what do we need to get there.

And part of the problem in corrections is, you know, we compete with schools and roads and infrastructure. But I think what the, what the policymakers have to understand is that the Correction facilities open 247 even during the pandemic. And it's a lot of wear and tear and drain on the staff and the infrastructure for the facilities.

And the fact that like parts of OCCC, 110 years old. If you've been to any of our facilities and it'll shock you when you go to the mainland and you look, you can go to a 25-year-old facility in the mainland and it'll look almost brand new compared to our facilities here.

The OCCC is old, antiquated, and it wasn't built with programs in mind. It wasn't built with program space. It wasn't built for rehabilitation. It was built for short term, hold them and let them go Last two.

Questions I have is with your facility at Waiawa and Kulani, which I've, I've toured and visited, I know it's not at capacity, right? But I know there's different classifications of inmates that are at these facilities. Does the Department have the authority to mix different types of populations even at underperforming or.

I wouldn't say underperforming, but underutilized facilities like Kulani and Walawa?

We could, but we will not mix pretrial and sentence felons because of the felons with prey on the pre trial. So a couple of things we've done to address that issue. One is we've had Chaminade University come in and Professor Janet Davidson is finishing up her final report on our classification system.

When I looked at our classification system, it was time driven, and it should be event-driven. So let me explain it to if you get a misconduct and it's a serious misconduct and it means you go back to medium or High for 18 months, there was no review in there.

So really you're sending somebody back to do dead time. So if you do a high misconduct, then we're going to be looking at the person every six months instead of 18 months. The other thing we did.

So so far in the preliminary report we got, we're doing fine with the ORAs, which is a jail, the Ohio Risk Assessment Instrument. We're doing fine with that. The application, the assessment is good.

We may not be doing so well with the level of service inventory revised for the sentence felon population because at some point in the early 2000s, some of the questions were changed for some reason. So it may have affected the outcome. So when we get up, when we get Dr. Davinson's report.

We're going to redo our classification system because I believe we're holding people upstream too long. So when you have something that's time driven, they just sit. But if it's event driven based on their behavior, then you can look at that at certain intervals and you can move them downstream faster.

So that's one thing we did, we're doing now. The second thing we did was we entered into a pilot project beginning the 1st of January of this year. If you look at 353, it says we are supposed to bring people back 48 months when they're within their tentative parole date.

We're going to go out to 60 months because 16 or 6060 we're going to go out to 60 months because we're going to automatically reclass them down because the only reason some are at medium is because of the time from now and the 48 months to the tentative parole date.

So we instituted the pilot program so that we have about 1,000 inmates on the mainland right now. About 240 of them are temporary because we're redoing some two modules at Halawa. So the numbers on the mainland really are around 700 and something.

So we're looking at filling that bed space in Moyava and Kulani Correctional Facility by lowering that classification level down so we can move them downstream and so we can fill those minimum security bed spaces because they're work camps and from those two facilities they go to work furlough at the jails.

And the last question I have is you heard about some questions earlier. If this would be an annual survey, is the Department open to having this as an annual?

I don't have a problem with it. I commend the Commission for taking that on because it took them a year to do it. So if they want to do it as the Commission, as the court indicated, we gave them full unfettered access.

We don't mind doing it because that gauge, it helps gauge tell us where we need to go. Are we doing well here? Are we doing more work? And in those areas we're doing well. How do we get there? How can we take that success and move it to another area Members?

Any follow up?

Yes. Senator Rhoads, off on a different tangent entirely with regard to the mental illness of the inmates. Have you given any thought to or do you ever do apply for assistance community treatment orders before the person, before the inmate is released?

So if they're in there for any length of time, you have an opportunity to observe what their mental health is and if there's reason to suspect that they have a mental illness that may impede their functioning normally in society when they get back out.

Have you ever, do you, do you have the capacity and the interest in having people leave with an order on them so that you don't. We don't have to go back through all. You know, we don't have to do this, the revolving door for six months before they end up back in your facility for some new crime?

I don't have a problem with. We don't have the capacity right now to do that which is part of the capacity. Don't you have.

We don't have the mental health staffing to do the evaluations on everybody going out the door. I can tell you about 60%. My understanding I could be a little bit off my understanding is 60% of the folks in our custody and care have some degree of mental health issues.

Of that and I'm not sure the percentage, some of them are seriously and persistently mentally ill. That would be the control the group I think you're talking about because those are the ones who would benefit from treatment.

Danger to life, danger to self or others is the standard. So the Department of Health, it's not something you cooperate with the Department of Health on. You can't say to them, hey, we've got this guy who we think is schizophrenic or having psychotic episodes. Can you come and look at him right now?

We do. We just started an initiative with the 704 cases for the evaluations. So that's we destined it's infancy. But we just worked out details with DOH.

I have no problem discussing that issue with DOH and I will contact Marian Tsuji, the Deputy Director for Behavioral Health and I'll mention your comments to her and see if there's some way we can work together because it is a good idea.

That would be great. Thanks very much. Thanks for consideration. You're welcome. Thanks Jerry.

Thank you. Other questions Members? If not. Thank you Director. Thank you. Members, any other questions for Commissioner Oversight or DCR? Okay. If not, I want to thank DCR and the Commission on Oversight and Members here and members of the public.

I also want to acknowledge my staff, Taylor, Faith and Jan, as well as Jasmine and our Sergeant at Arms and our IT folks, Robbie and Natasha. Thank you so much for coordinating today's informational briefing. There being no further business. We're adjourned.