STAND. COM. REP. NO. 2345

Honolulu, Hawaii

RE:    S.B. No. 2342

       S.D. 1

Honorable Colleen Hanabusa

President of the Senate

Twenty-Fourth State Legislature

Regular Session of 2008

State of Hawaii

Madam:

     Your Committee on Public Safety, to which was referred S.B. No. 2342 entitled:

"A BILL FOR AN ACT RELATING TO THE AUDITOR,"

begs leave to report as follows:

     The purpose of this measure is to require the state Auditor to conduct performance audits of private prisons on the mainland that have a contract with the State to incarcerate convicted residents of Hawaii.

     Testimony in support of this measure was submitted by the Hawaii Government Employees Association, the Community Alliance on Prisons, Ke Kahua Pa‘a, the Drug Policy Forum of Hawai‘i, and two individual citizens.

     Your Committee finds that a performance audit of the Otter Creek Correctional Facility (OCCF) in Wheelwright, Kentucky and the Saguaro Correctional Facility (SGF) in Eloy, Arizona should be conducted by the state Auditor.  Those two facilities alone have over two thousand Hawaii residents incarcerated in them and there has never been a performance audit conducted by any state agency to monitor those private contracts and the safety of the Hawaii inmates in those facilities.  In this regard, since the Red Rock Correctional Facility has significantly fewer Hawaii inmate transferees than OCCF or SGF, your Committee finds, for cost-benefit reasons, that the performance audits should focus, at this time, on SGF and OCCF.  Finally, the need for a performance audit for OCCF will be diminished if the State begins a process of returning all female prisoners, who were previously transferred from Hawaii to OCCF, back to Hawaii in 2009.

     Accordingly, your Committee has amended this measure by:

     (1)  Deleting the request for a performance audit of the Red Rock Correctional Facility in Eloy, Arizona; and

     (2)  Authorizing the withdrawal of the requirement for a performance audit of OCCF in Wheelwright, Kentucky, if the process of bringing back all the Hawaii female prisoners from OCCF back to Hawaii begins in 2009.

     As affirmed by the record of votes of the members of your Committee on Public Safety that is attached to this report, your Committee is in accord with the intent and purpose of S.B. No. 2342, as amended herein, and recommends that it pass Second Reading in the form attached hereto as S.B. No. 2342, S.D. 1, and be referred to the Committee on Ways and Means.

Respectfully submitted on behalf of the members of the Committee on Public Safety,

____________________________

WILL ESPERO, Chair