Transfers in Hawaii (HI DCR)

Finding someone

Hawaii does not run a public DCR offender-lookup website. The official tool is VINELink, the statewide victim and offender notification service: open vinelink.com, select Hawaii as the state, and search by name. The same information is available by phone at 1-800-247-9763.

VINELink can also register a phone number or email for notification when a person’s custody status changes. Because Hawaii moves people between island jails, the in-state prisons, and the out-of-state facility in Arizona, the location shown can change, so checking again later is how a current placement is confirmed.

A unified jail-and-prison system

Hawaii is one of a small number of states with a unified corrections system: the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR) runs both pretrial detention and the prisons that hold sentenced people, because Hawaii has no county jails. The four Community Correctional Centers function as jails — they hold mostly pretrial and short-sentence people — while four other facilities are the sentenced-felon prisons.

One practical consequence is that there is no single dedicated men’s reception prison. Pretrial booking happens at the island jail for the area of arrest:

• Oahu — Oahu Community Correctional Center (OCCC)
• Maui — Maui Community Correctional Center (MCCC)
• Hawaii Island — Hawaii Community Correctional Center (HCCC)
• Kauai — Kauai Community Correctional Center (KCCC)

DCR’s separate Intake Service Centers handle pretrial assessment on each main island. Classification — the process that assigns where a sentenced person is housed — runs through the jails and Halawa rather than through one named reception center.

Where people are housed after sentencing

After sentencing, people are classified and assigned by custody level and bed space rather than a fixed routing, but some general patterns hold:

• Sentenced men are classified and, where appropriate, held at Halawa Correctional Facility in Aiea — Hawaii’s largest and main male prison — and may then be placed at the minimum-security Waiawa or Kulani facilities, or transferred out of state to Saguaro in Arizona.
• All women in custody are held at the Women’s Community Correctional Center (WCCC) in Kailua, the only women’s prison in Hawaii, which holds all custody levels.

Because intake is tied to the island of arrest, the facility shown in VINELink early on may reflect the booking location rather than a longer-term assignment.

Out-of-state transfers to Saguaro

The defining Hawaii transfer pattern is sentenced Hawaii men moved out of state. Hawaii has contracted for out-of-state private-prison beds since the 1990s to relieve in-state overcrowding. Those beds are at the Saguaro Correctional Center in Eloy, Arizona, a prison operated by CoreCivic that also holds Idaho and Montana inmates in separate populations.

As of April 2026, roughly 800 Hawaii men were held at Saguaro, down from about 1,700 in the 2010s; the contract authorizes up to 938. Lawmakers have considered proposals to begin returning Hawaii inmates from Arizona to in-state facilities, but the CoreCivic contract continues as of mid-2026, and DCR has tied any return to its limited in-state capacity.

A move to Saguaro is a transfer to another state, roughly 3,000 miles from the islands, so it changes nearly every part of how families stay in contact. The facility, the visiting process, and the methods for sending money and arranging calls all differ from the in-state system. See Saguaro Correctional Center.

What a transfer means for visiting

A transfer can change visiting logistics. Every visitor must be on the person’s approved visitor list, and visits are arranged per facility — Hawaii has no statewide online visit scheduler for its in-state facilities, and each posts its own visitation schedule and hotline. The days, hours, and contact level depend on the facility and the person’s classification, so a move can change when and how visits happen. See Visiting in Hawaii.

Distance is a larger factor in Hawaii than in most states. The neighbor-island facilities — MCCC on Maui, HCCC on Hawaii Island, and KCCC on Kauai — are reachable from Oahu mainly by air, and video visitation on GTL tablets is the practical remote option for in-state facilities. A transfer to Saguaro moves a person to the mainland entirely: in-person visiting requires travel to Arizona, video visits for the Hawaii population are scheduled through the State of Hawaii mainland branch, and the methods for sending money change as well. See Sending Money in Hawaii for the difference between the in-state system and Saguaro.

Verify Before Acting

For the general, nationwide overview of this topic, see the national guide: Know Your Rights.