State lawmakers advanced a bill yesterday that would bring all Hawai'i inmates housed in Mainland jails back to the state by 2015 by developing prisons and rehabilitation programs at home.

Currently, the state pays the Corrections Corporation of America more than $50 million a year to house more than 2,000 men and women in three CCA prisons in Arizona and Kentucky because there is no room for them in Island facilities.

More than half of the state's prison population is housed out of state. The practice of shipping inmates to the Mainland began in 1995.

It could take years and an undetermined amount of unbudgeted money to build or find suitable bed space and develop enough substance abuse and other rehabilitation programs to handle returning prisoners.

House Speaker Calvin Say, D-20th (St. Louis Heights, Palolo Valley), said money is scarce for new programs and facilities.

The measure is intended to create a six-year financial plan that lays out what it would take to relocate Mainland prisoners to Hawai'i.

"We should take a look at it if it's costing us $50 million (a year). That's money going out and that's not being circulated here in the state," Say said.

State Rep. Faye Hanohano, D-4th (Puna, Pahoa, Hawaiian Acres), a former corrections officer, said the state needs to put more effort into developing rehabilitation programs in addition to bringing prisoners home.

Keeping inmates in Mainland prisons exposes them to a more ruthless and sophisticated criminal element and many bring that mentality back to Hawai'i, she said.

"When we shipped our inmates to the Mainland, they became gang members to learn to defend themselves," Hanohano said. "Then they come back here and they have that mentality because they don't have transition programs."

The House bill, which requires the Public Safety Department to build sufficient facilities to house inmates in Hawai'i by the end of 2015, passed out of the Public Safety Committee and advances to the House Finance Committee.

State Sen. Will Espero, D-20th ('Ewa Beach, Waipahu), one of the authors of a bill in 2007 that required Mainland-held prisoners to be brought home a year before their release, called the House timetable a "noble date."

"I don't know whether we'll be able to accommodate that but the key is to either build prisons or build the infrastructure where we can get prisoners into more community-based programs or programs that are alternatives to incarceration," Espero said.

Having prisoners housed in state makes fiscal sense and helps "their rehabilitation and re-entry into society," Espero said.

The state Department of Public Safety is planning a larger prison on Maui to replace the Maui Community Correctional Center. The state is also exploring the possibility of relocating or expanding the O'ahu Community Correctional Facility.