Money panel approves funding for chemical castration, civil commitment

Friday, May 16, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

The measures include the creation of a sex offender database, victim notification, psychosexual evaluation and controversial plans allowing chemical castration and civil commitment of offenders.

"All were unanimous," said Sen. Mark James, R-Las Vegas, who developed the package in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he chairs.

Noting that both Judiciary and Senate Finance have approved the measures, he said, "We now have 14 members of the Senate who have already voted for these bills in committee.

"There's a lot of momentum as they go to the Assembly and the governor has indicated he supports them."

James was much less enthusiastic after bills were first referred to Finance. They were sent there because the initial fiscal notes estimating their costs to the Department of Prisons, mental health, parole and probation, criminal history repository and child and family services divisions totaled more than $11.8 million for the next two years.

That didn't include the $11.8 million cost of building a 50-bed special secure facility for civilly committed sexual predators.

By the time James finished negotiating, arguing and recalculating costs with those agencies, he had replaced the 50-bed civil prison with a $2.7 million facility and cut the other costs to $5 million.

'He had done a phenomenal amount of work with the agencies to lower the fiscal notes," Sen. Ray Rawson, R-Las Vegas, said, adding that made the bills more palatable to the Finance Committee, which develops the state budget.

"I don't think these were viable fiscal notes in the first place," James said. "These are programs addressed to a narrow segment of offenders, and they can be handled through existing programs."

In the end, heads of those departments largely agreed with him.

The bills include:

-SB5, requiring psychological certification for sex offenders on parole.

-SB6, requiring that victims and witnesses be notified when the offenders in their cases is released.

-SB99, requiring the pre-sentence psychosexual evaluations of offenders before they are sentenced.

-SB103, creating a database dealing specifically with sex offenders within the state's criminal history repository.

-SB100, allowing district attorneys to seek civil commitment for chronic, predatory sex offenders after they finish serving their sentences.

-SB101, allowing prosecutors to chemically castrate a sex offender.

-SB113, providing for random drug and alcohol testing of certain offenders in prison and allows restrictions on graphic, violent or sexually explicit entertainment materials they can have.