Five years after the state acknowledged it needs more than a thousand new "re-entry" beds to help inmates leaving prisons make the difficult transition back to their hometowns, the inventory of halfway house space hasn't significantly grown.

Yet the effort to expand the number of community-based re-entry beds for inmates has repeatedly been cited by prison officials as a top priority. And Public Safety deputy director Frank Lopez said in 2005 he was planning community discussions on each island to prepare the way for a string of new halfway houses across the state.

Since then the prison inmate population has continued to grow, but progress in providing those additional transitional beds for inmates exiting the system has been slow.

The Laumaka Work Furlough Center in Honolulu added 20 beds last year, to bring it to a total of 110, and a nonprofit agency serving the homeless opened a 28-bed inmate transition program in a refurbished former hotel in downtown Hilo late last year, so some beds have been added.

Prison officials did not respond to repeated requests for a description of the overall progress the state has made in carrying out the department's long-standing plans to add re-entry beds.

State lawmakers gave prison officials $293,000 five years ago to plan for 1,225 new re-entry beds, but prison spokeswoman Louise Kim McCoy said that contract was "put on hold" after it was awarded to an architectural firm. McCoy said she was unable to learn the reason for the delay because the staff member with that information was unavailable.

NEW INITIATIVE

Now, Gov. Linda Lingle is asking state lawmakers for $1.5 million to begin selecting sites and developing transitional housing for inmates statewide, but prison officials declined to discuss that initiative until after they have briefed state lawmakers.

Former state prisons director Ted Sakai said he sought money to expand the number of re-entry beds in part because he believed that if former inmates successfully adjust after release, that will save taxpayers money and ease prison overcrowding.

Sakai said many Hawai'i convicts now sitting in prison were released but later returned to prison for parole violations because they weren't functioning properly on the outside.

"If you can get people to get out and stay out, the demand for beds space is reduced," Sakai said.

Hawai'i spends more than $40 million a year to hold about half of its state prison population in privately run prisons on the Mainland, which means reduced demand for prison beds can translate immediately into money saved.

Supporters of expanding re-entry programs include Big Island Mayor Harry Kim, who established a Going Home task force to try to connect former inmates with jobs, and to help them in other ways. Kim said the inmates need the help.

"All we've done is create a big revolving door," Kim said. "I think we as a community should take a real good, hard look at what we're doing."

The re-entry issue has gotten bigger as Hawai'i's prison population has grown.

The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that nationwide at least 95 percent of all state prison inmates will be released at some point, and many of those former inmates will fail.

Nationally, a 2002 U.S. Department of Justice report found that 67 percent of state prison inmates who were released in 1994 committed at least one serious new crime in the three years that followed.

GOING BACK TO CRIME

In Hawai'i, a 2002 study done by Department of Public Safety researchers found that about half of a study group of inmates paroled from 1996 to mid-1999 had either a new felony conviction or saw their parole revoked within three years.

Inmates who go through intensive re-entry or transition programs seem to have a better record. Prison officials reported last week that the recidivism rate for male inmates in a program called Project Bridge at Laumaka was less than 30 percent over two years, and inmates in the Bridge program at the women's prison in Kailua had a 13 percent recidivism rate.

A preliminary study of the model BEST re-entry program on Maui found that fewer than 15 percent of the high-risk convicted felons (mostly male) released through that program have been returned to jail. However, the researcher who did the Maui study cautioned that it is too soon to cite those statistics as firm evidence that the Maui program is reducing recidivism.

Inmates involved in re-entry programs around the state are believers, however. One example is Joby Crichton, 41, who has been living in the newly established nonprofit Ponahawai Ola in Hilo.

Crichton had been using methamphetamine off and on for 17 years, and was homeless in Kona before she was jailed for nearly 11 months in 2005 on drug charges. As she waited for her release from the Hawai'i Community Correctional Center in Hilo last year, Crichton worried about what to do next.

She had not worked since 2001, and her spotty employment history was unlikely to impress any potential employers. She didn't want to return her hometown in Kona and become caught up in the drug scene there again, and she didn't want to burden her family, she said.

"I was at the point where, OK, if I were to get into a fight with someone else, I could stay in," she said. "I was afraid to leave. I didn't want to leave jail because I had nowhere to go."

Finally Crichton was accepted into Ponahawai Ola, a program operated by the Care-A-Van homeless program under the Office of Social Ministry. The program made sense for Care-A-Van because convicts who have been released frequently become homeless, said program team leader Les Estrella.

GIVING THEM TOOLS

Residents are allowed to remain at Ponahawai Ola in downtown Hilo for up to 24 months, living in subsidized housing while they get job training, counseling and other services to get them ready for life on their own. They are pressed to work, and to save money.

Carrie Ann Shirota, director of the BEST Program on Maui, said the male inmates in that program often need job training, or struggle to get together the money they need for rent for tools so they can return to a trade. BEST takes only Class A or B felons, convicted of the most serious crimes.

"Our program is showing that if you provide the training and support services, even individuals with the most severe record, they can change," she said.

Lorraine Robinson, executive director of a re-entry program called Ka Hale Ho'ala Hou No Na Wahine ("home of reawakening for women") said transition beds can be the difference between success and failure.

What former inmates need to succeed is stable work, stable housing and family support, but inmates typically "have trashed their lives in lots of different ways, they've burned their bridges, and so they need to rebuild the foundation," Robinson said.

"A lot of women come into our program wanting to change but not knowing how, and what we do is we give them the tools and the experience," she said. "When it gets hard, we support them. ...They are inevitably going to come up against barriers, and what they do when they hit those barriers, the kind of support they have, that can be the critical point."

One of Robinson's clients for the past year has been Fran Sutton, 47, who served six years in prison in Hawai'i and on the Mainland on a heroin conviction. Since her release, she has completed job training, gone to work and been promoted.

Now she is starting the search for her own apartment, but Sutton said she isn't sure what would have happened to her without the Ka Hale Ho'ala program.

"It's an extended family that you can always count on, and a lot of the girls need that," she said. "If they don't have that, and then they revert right back to what they know best, prostitution, selling dope, living on the street."

Reach Kevin Dayton at kdayton@honoluluadvertiser.com.