Hawaiʻi’s ongoing bribery investigation might lead to corruptomania, and that’s dangerous.

Corruptomania overemphasizes the problem of corruption and distracts from Hawaiʻi’s real problem.

Hawaiʻi’s main problem isn’t corruption. It’s incompetence. Incompetence is harder to root out than corruption any day of the week, not even close.

Honest government is no guarantee of good government because effective governing requires much more than honest people.

Rooting out sleazebags and criminals won’t get at this problem because corruptomaina is all about honesty — an important value for sure and easy to talk about — while fixing incompetency is all about nuts and bolts, which is not easy to talk about at all.

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Effective government needs people and institutions that get the job done, nuts and bolts competence, quality work and being on time. 

Corruptomania reinforces a “they’re all corrupt” view that makes it even harder to make government better. And this is such a common and corrosive outlook.

Studies show that the public has a very wide definition of corruption that goes far beyond the legal meaning and includes things like ordinary legislative bargaining, policies you disagree with, and incompetence as well.

In Hawaiʻi this definition also includes “the unions,” “the Democratic machine” and “the old boys’ network.”

In one form or the other, they become catchalls — explanations for everything that’s bad. “What do you expect?’ It’s the old boys network.”

“They’re all corrupt!” becomes more than a slogan. It becomes the key to understanding politics — the single thread, all you need to know.

They’re what a couple of political scientists who have written about conspiracy theories call “conspiracy theories without content.” Simply saying them makes them true.

If you think “they’re all corrupt” is just a throwaway line in Hawaiʻi, well, then you’ve never listened to on-the-street conversations about politics, or paid attention to how many times this idea shows up at family gatherings or in readers’ comments.

There is so much ineffective governance here that the state motto could be “The life of the land is perpetuated in incompetence.”

The “it’s corruption” mantra commonly comes into play in virtually every one of these situations and doesn’t bother to look at what’s really going on. Why bother? They are corrupt, end of story.

But consider two examples of awful government discussed in the same recent issue of Civil Beat.  Both involve government agencies that are serial incompetents, the Department of Education and the prisons. Each involve persistently bad behavior that’s been called out before but continues worse than ever.

In neither case is there a ghost of a chance that there is any corruption involved.

In 2021 the Legislature mandated the DOE to have 30% of the food in school lunches purchased from local farmers by 2030. 

It’s not happening, not even close. A recent auditor’s report, which by the way uncannily resembles an earlier assessment of the DOE’s school air conditioning failure, basically stated that there is nothing good to report. 

DOE is far short of its goals and doesn’t even have a solid plan to achieve them. The auditor calls the DOE plan simply a profession of faith.

So, the food program is a persistent problem. And there is not one iota of a chance, not one, that corruption is involved. The program was still using pencil and paper to keep records. You think it was because they were being bribed by ball point pen industry lobbyists?

The state just agreed to pay $800,000 to the widow of an Oʻahu Community Correctional Center prisoner who, after repeatedly saying he wanted to kill himself but was never put on suicide watch, was able to get a rope and hang himself.

Prison protocol was violated right down the line. An unqualified intern did the assessment. The prisoner was evaluated by peeking into the cell. Guards were elsewhere when his cellmates called for help. And no one can explain how he got a rope, which as one of his attorneys pointed out is a lot bigger than a shoelace, into his hands.

Hawaiʻi’s prison system constantly gets terrible evaluations. It’s definitely understaffed. And there have been some corruption issues with prison guards furnishing inmates with drugs.

But once again, the fundamental, persistent suicide problem is not about corruption. It’s about incompetence, lack of resources and failure to follow rules. Organizational failure, not organizational graft.

Of course the Hawaiʻi bribery investigation should go forward. No politician should be allowed to use public office for private gain.

Keep in mind, though, that it brings corruptomania out of the woodwork, a distraction and a danger.

Corruptomaina distracts in two ways. First, it overemphasizes the effect getting rid of crooks has on making government better.

Second, it reinforces a  common, misleading “it’s all about corruption” mindset that turns people away from incompetence issues.

Think back to those people-on-the-street conversations about corruption I mentioned earlier.  They include lots of complaining, cynicism and conspiracy theories about corruption but no real engagement with the fundamental issues about how government really works.

Why bother with the details if you attribute everything to corruption? Complain and accuse but don’t hold government accountable.

Making government agencies work better is a really hard combination of better resources, more effective legislative oversight, and doing the trench work necessary to give organizations better ways of doing what they are supposed to do.

Corruptomania encourages those people who avoid nuts and bolts concerns and instead wax not very eloquently at all with pie-in-the-sky explanations about crooks, thieves and dirty politicians.

School kids aren’t going to be able to eat healthy local food just because we discover who the “influential state legislator” was who took money.

Prison suicides aren’t going to end because the Legislature passes tougher anti-corruption laws and a few more politicians go to jail.

Be sure to let the widow of the prisoner who hanged himself know that it’s all about corruption.

If life were only that simple.

It’s not. And that’s not a theory without evidence.