Hawaii has agreed to open its prisons and jails for inspection by two national experts who will assess the state’s troubled inmate mental health services, the Honolulu Civil Beat reports. The agreement was reached as part of ongoing efforts to resolve a federal lawsuit filed in 2019 over prisoner suicides. There is no agreement yet on financial aspects of the case. The experts will produce a plan to improve the state’s correctional mental health system, which has been falling far short filling critical positions such as psychologists, psychiatrists and advanced practice registered nurses. Twenty of the department’s 23 psychologist positions are vacant, and one of the three filled positions is held by a provider who has not yet passed the psychologist licensing examination, legislators were told recently by Tommy Johnson, director of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
There were five suspected or confirmed suicides by Hawaii inmates in 2024 — four men and one woman — the largest number since corrections officials reported five confirmed suicides in 2016, data compiled by Civil Beat shows. Nationally, 41% of federal and state prisoners have a history of mental health problems, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Attorney Eric Seitz filed the 2019 class-action lawsuit against the state, alleging corrections officials “subject people with serious mental illnesses to extreme isolation with little or no mental health treatment.” The suit was originally filed on behalf of the family of an inmate who killed herself while in a state correctional facility two years earlier, and another who was rendered a paraplegic in a suicide attempt. Seitz said Thursday the suit followed a rash of suicides inside Hawaii prisons and jails nearly a decade ago. In it, he claimed the state failed to provide adequate mental health care, including basic measures to prevent suicide and self-harm. “They’re understaffed, the facilities are not conducive to providing the care that they need, they can’t transfer out people who need to be in hospitals because the (state) hospital is overpopulated at this point, so it’s kind of desperate,” Seitz said.
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