By Kevin Dayton
The city’s emergency medical workers will no longer care for sick or injured inmates in state correctional facilities, and instead will require the prisoners be brought outside for treatment, according to the director of Honolulu Emergency Services.
In a letter dated Thursday, Emergency Services Director Jim Ireland said the change came in response to recent incidents at the Oʻahu Community Correctional Center and Hālawa Correctional Facility “where EMS crews did not have adequate prison staff in attendance for their safety.”
“Effective immediately EMS will not be entering facilities and will receive patients outside, either at the gate or building,” Ireland wrote.
The terse, two-paragraph letter did not explain exactly what triggered that dramatic change in procedure.
“That’s pretty shocking to me,” said Wookie Kim, legal director for the ACLU of Hawaiʻi. “From our perspective this very much seems like an abdication of responsibility on the part of the city. The whole point of EMS is to respond to medical emergencies wherever they occur.”
He described the city’s decision as “unjustified, and really callous, but at the same time that doesn’t excuse the state from doing what it needs to do to ensure that those in its custody get the medical care that they may need, particularly when there’s an emergency that prompted calling 911.”
“The reality is that the state is responsible for protecting the health and safety of the prisoners in its care,” he said.
Corrections officers and facility medical staff members regularly respond to medical emergencies inside state prisons and jails, and city EMS workers are called for the most serious or life-threatening cases. Once the EMS teams and firefighters are on the scene, they normally take over treatment of ill or injured people.
Mark Patterson, who worked as a corrections captain at both Hālawa and OCCC, said corrections staff are trained to lock down inmates in emergencies to clear a route for EMS, police or firefighters to follow to get them to the scene.
Security staff escorted emergency workers through the facility, then stood by while the emergency crews did their work, said Patterson, who is chair of the Hawaiʻi Correctional System Oversight Commission.
He said he never heard of a case where EMS staffers were unable to reach an emergency, or did not have proper security.
“It is a responsibility of the facility to secure a path from the parking area or wherever they are entering the facility to wherever the situation is,” Patterson said.
Liability Concerns
Patterson also said he doubts OCCC and Hālawa staff will be able to move prisoners outside the facilities for treatment in some cases.
“If you’re doing CPR, you’re not going to move the body. So if the guy dies, who is to blame?” he said. “The prison’s going to say ‘We called EMS and they didn’t come.'”
Kim raised a similar concern about potential legal liability.
“I can see this going very poorly for a lot of people in the near future if, for example, someone dies because of EMS’s new policy of not entering the facilities,” he said. “Let’s just say, for the plaintiff’s bar out there, there would be great opportunities.”
“I don’t know the full context of what may have precipitated this, but certainly that’s a very extreme response to take, even if there was some issue that arose during a prior visit, a prior call,” he said.
Ireland did not respond to a request for comment Monday.
Rosemarie Bernardo, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation public information officer, said only that the department is looking into the matter.
Article can be found at https://www.civilbeat.org/2025/04/honolulu-ems-chief-says-medics-arent-s...ʻahu-prisons/