Hawaii

Hawaii’s prisons and jails are run by the Hawaii Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (HI DCR), the agency created on January 1, 2024 when the former Department of Public Safety was reorganized and its law-enforcement functions were split off. Hawaii is one of a handful of states with a unified corrections system: because Hawaii has no county jails, the state runs both the pretrial jails and the prisons for sentenced people. The agency refers to a person in its custody as an inmate; there is no public DCR web locator, so people are found through VINELink (the national VINE service; select Hawaii), or by calling 1-800-247-9763.

This section details nine facilities — four prisons, four jails, and one out-of-state prison. The four prisons, which hold sentenced people, are Halawa Correctional Facility (Aiea, Oahu), the largest and main facility for men; Waiawa Correctional Facility (Oahu), a minimum-security prison for men nearing release; Kulani Correctional Facility, a minimum-security men’s prison on the Big Island; and the Women’s Community Correctional Center (Kailua, Oahu), the only women’s prison in the state. The four jails, officially the Community Correctional Centers, hold mostly pretrial and short-sentence people of both sexes and also some sentenced people: Oahu Community Correctional Center (OCCC), the largest; Maui Community Correctional Center (Wailuku); Hawaii Community Correctional Center (Hilo); and Kauai Community Correctional Center (Lihue).

A defining feature of Hawaii is that many of its sentenced men are held thousands of miles away. About 800 Hawaii men are housed on the U.S. mainland at the Saguaro Correctional Center in Eloy, Arizona, a private prison operated by CoreCivic under a contract Hawaii has used since the 1990s to relieve in-state crowding. Visiting someone at Saguaro means traveling to Arizona or connecting by video and phone on a schedule that facility sets — its rules, money process, and visiting arrangements differ from the in-state facilities and are covered on its own page. Lawmakers have weighed proposals to begin returning people to Hawaii, but as of mid-2026 the out-of-state contract continues.

Geography shapes visiting even within Hawaii. The neighbor-island facilities — on Maui, Kauai, and the Big Island — are reachable from Oahu mainly by air, so an in-person visit can require a flight. Video visits are available through tablets at the in-state facilities, which is the practical remote option for families on another island.

Hawaii has no death penalty — capital punishment was abolished in 1957, before statehood. No Hawaii facility holds a death row.

A few features shape how families stay in touch. Incoming personal mail goes directly to the facility at the in-state prisons and jails — Hawaii does not use an off-site mail-scanning vendor — with books and magazines accepted only directly from a publisher or approved vendor; mail to Saguaro follows that prison’s own rules. Phones, tablets, and video visits run through GTL / ViaPath, billed through ConnectNetwork, which is also how money is deposited to an in-state account (a separate process applies at Saguaro). Health care is provided in-house by DCR’s Health Care Services Division. Independent oversight runs through the Hawaii Correctional System Oversight Commission (HCSOC). A new Oahu jail to replace the aging OCCC is in the planning stage; it is noted on the OCCC page but is not yet built.

Use the guides below for the statewide rules, or go straight to a specific facility.