Death, Illness, and Notification in Hawaii Prisons

There are two directions a death or a serious illness can travel through a prison wall, and a family usually only thinks about it when it is already happening.

One direction is from the outside in. Someone in the family is dying or has died, and you need the prison to tell your incarcerated person, and you are wondering whether he can be there for it. The other direction is from the inside out. Your person is the one who is sick, or who has died in custody, and you are trying to find out what happened and what you are allowed to do. This article walks both directions for Hawaii, run by the Hawaii Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR).

Two things about Hawaii shape everything that follows. First, Hawaii runs a unified system: the same department operates the jails that hold people awaiting trial and the prisons that hold sentenced people, with the jails called community correctional centers on each island. Second, and this is the big one, Hawaii does not have enough prison beds for its sentenced men, so for many years it has held roughly a thousand of them on the mainland, at the Saguaro Correctional Center in Eloy, Arizona, a private prison. If your person is at Saguaro, an ocean and several time zones sit between him and any family funeral, and that changes what is realistic.

I am also going to tell you something I learned the hard way, because I do not want it to land on you cold. An approval that has been granted is not the same as your person being there. Those are two different things, and the gap between them is where families get hurt. In Hawaii, with people held thousands of miles away, that gap is at its widest.

When the Death or Illness Is on the Outside

If someone in the family is gravely ill or has died and you want your incarcerated person notified, the channel is the facility, usually through the chaplain or the inmate's case manager or unit team. Call the institution, explain the emergency, and be ready to provide verification, such as the funeral home's information or a death certificate for a death, or a hospital or physician confirmation for an imminent death. If your person is held at Saguaro in Arizona, you may be working through both the DCR Mainland Branch and the contract facility's staff, so ask the DCR how to reach the right people.

Notification is the part that tends to work, even across distance. Whether your person can leave the prison to be there is a separate and much harder question, and for an out-of-state inmate it is harder still.

Attending a Funeral or a Bedside Visit in Hawaii

An escorted trip out of a facility to attend a funeral or visit a critically ill family member is, in every state, a tightly limited and supervised event, decided case by case based on custody level, security, the verified relationship, and staffing. In Hawaii two realities dominate.

For someone held in Hawaii. A request goes through the facility and is evaluated against custody and security. As with everywhere, it is escorted, in custody, and never guaranteed, and the short window before a funeral often runs out before everything can be approved and arranged.

For someone held at Saguaro in Arizona. Be realistic. Transporting a person from a private prison in Arizona back to a funeral in Hawaii under escort is enormously expensive and logistically heavy, and it rarely happens in the time a funeral allows. For most out-of-state families, an in-person trip home for a funeral is not a plan you can count on. This is not me being harsh; it is me trying to spare you a second heartbreak on top of the first.

Now the part I promised you.

I was told I had a five-hour furlough to attend my mother's funeral. I was told to get dressed and wait for the escort. I got dressed. I waited. The escort never came. Word going around was that the warden had been moved or was on leave, and the assistant warden denied it. Nobody walked up to me with a form. The day just passed. What I got, in the end, was a free phone call.

I tell you that not to make you bitter before you start, but to make you smart. An approval that exists on paper is not a person standing at a graveside. Administrators change. Acting wardens reverse decisions. Escort details fall through, and across state lines they often never come together at all. If you are pinning the family's grief on the hope that he will physically be there, you are building on sand. Plan the service around the family that can be there. If he makes it, that is a mercy. If he does not, you were not depending on it, and the grief is heavy enough without that.

Use the phone and the tablet. Hawaii has deployed tablets to inmates that support phone and video calls, and the facilities use GTL/ViaPath for calls. For a family separated by an ocean, the realistic way for your person to take part in a service is by phone or video. Ask the chaplain or case manager to help arrange a call timed to the service, and ask early.

When the Illness or Death Is on the Inside

The other direction is harder, because you have less control and the information comes slower, and slower still when your person is on the mainland.

If your person is seriously ill in custody. Push for medical information, knowing that medical privacy rules limit what staff will share unless the inmate has authorized release of information to you. Encourage your person, while able, to sign a release naming you. Note that one of the criteria Hawaii uses for sending people to a mainland prison is the absence of major health or medical issues, so a person whose health is seriously declining may be a candidate to be brought back to Hawaii; ask the DCR about that. If the condition is terminal or grave, learn about medical release now, not later.

Hawaii medical and compassionate release. Hawaii law, in Chapter 353 of the Hawaii Revised Statutes, provides for medical release of an inmate before the end of the sentence due to the inmate's medical condition, decided through the Hawaii Paroling Authority. The framework is aimed at people who are seriously ill, including those whose prognosis is that death will occur within about a year, those with a seriously debilitating and irreversible condition better managed in the community, and certain aging inmates whose condition impairs their functioning, where the person poses a low risk to public safety. A medical and psychosocial care plan and continuity of care from prison to the community are part of it, and the release can be revoked and the person returned to custody if they recover or violate conditions. These releases have historically been few, so the practical lesson is the same one I keep repeating: if your person may qualify, get the diagnosis documented, have your person sign the medical release of information, ask the prison medical staff and the Paroling Authority to start the process, and consider an attorney. Do not wait.

If your person dies in custody. Hawaii has a notably strong death-reporting law, found at section 353-40 of the Hawaii Revised Statutes. Within 48 hours, the director must report the death of a Hawaii inmate, including one held in a contracted out-of-state facility or in the custody of an agent of such a facility, to the governor, who reports it to the legislature; and within seven days the department must post a copy of that report on its public website. When the official cause of death is determined, a further report follows, and a clinical mortality review report is required within 30 days. Critically for families, Hawaii law provides that when the medical examiner's report is received, the department makes its report public and readily available first to the family member or other person designated by the decedent, and then to the press. In plain terms, the family is supposed to get the information first.

Notification to the family. The DCR notifies the family using the contact your person has on record, which is exactly why that contact must be correct now, especially for an out-of-state inmate where every link in the chain is longer.

Autopsy and the medical examiner. Hawaii uses a county-based medical examiner and coroner system under Chapter 841 of the Hawaii Revised Statutes. A death in prison is one of the categories that must be investigated. On Oahu, the City and County of Honolulu has a Department of the Medical Examiner; in the counties of Hawaii, Maui, and Kauai, the chief of police serves ex officio as coroner with a designated physician. If your person dies at Saguaro in Arizona, the death is investigated by the Arizona medical examiner's office with local Arizona law enforcement, which adds distance and time to getting answers and the body home.

Claiming the body. To claim your person, contact a funeral home and tell them your loved one is in the care of the medical examiner; the funeral home coordinates the transfer once the examination allows. On Oahu, the Department of the Medical Examiner can often release the person the same day the examination is completed, sometimes with a short delay to confirm identity. For an out-of-state death, the funeral home and the family will also be coordinating transport back to Hawaii, which takes longer and costs more, so ask the DCR what assistance, if any, exists for returning a person's remains from the mainland. Be clear about who the legal next of kin is, because disputes between family members slow everything down.

If the family cannot afford a funeral. Ask the funeral home and the State Department of Human Services about funeral assistance, and ask the DCR about help with returning remains from the mainland.

What Families Can Do Before a Crisis

Most of the pain in these situations comes from decisions that were never made in calm times. A few things you can do now, while no one is dying:

Make sure your person has the correct emergency contact and next of kin recorded with the DCR, and keep it current. This determines who is notified, and Hawaii law gives the designated person the death report first.

Have your person sign a medical release of information naming the family members who should be allowed to speak with medical staff. Without it, privacy rules will keep you in the dark.

Find out whether your person is held in Hawaii or at Saguaro in Arizona, because that single fact changes what is realistic for a funeral, for visits, and for getting answers and the body home.

If your person is on the mainland and their health is seriously declining, ask the DCR whether they can be returned to Hawaii, and ask the prison medical staff and the Hawaii Paroling Authority about medical release.

Set up phone and video access through the inmate tablet system now, so a call to a service can be arranged quickly when it matters.

Register with Hawaii SAVIN for status notifications, and keep the funeral home's contact information handy.

State Resources

Hawaii Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation: contact the institution directly; use the DCR website for facility, chaplain, and Mainland Branch contacts, and for the public inmate-death notification reports.

Hawaii Paroling Authority: for medical and compassionate release.

Department of the Medical Examiner (City and County of Honolulu) at (808) 768-3090, or the county coroner on the neighbor islands: for cause of death, autopsy, release of remains, and personal property.

Hawaii Department of Health, Vital Statistics: for certified copies of the death certificate.

Hawaii CARES 988: dial 988, or neighbor islands toll-free (800) 753-6879, for crisis and grief support.