Improvement sought for inmates’ transition to outside

Siobhan McDonough

Friday, May 11, 2001 | 10:43 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- A prison official urged Nevada lawmakers Thursday to help nonviolent inmates make a successful transition back to the streets.

"We're changing the way we do business," Dorothy Nash Holmes, special assistant to the director of the Department of Prisons, told the Assembly Judiciary Committee.

"We have to help (inmates) transition. Giving them $25 and a kick out the door doesn't help."

Holmes backed Senate Bill 519, which enables the Department of Prisons, Division of Parole and Probation and Nevada's court system to establish re-entry programs for inmates who are released from prison.

The measure, sponsored by Sen. Lawrence Jacobsen, R-Minden, would allow eligible inmates to participate in programs that would help them find housing and jobs, receive counseling and gain life skills.

"We know transition works but we've never done this in Nevada," Holmes said. "It gets everyone in the system working together."

Assemblywoman Sandra Tiffany, R-Henderson, co-sponsored the bill, saying "It's an alternative to incarceration."

"When prisoners get released they get $25, a blue shirt and a 'bye-bye,"' she said, adding that transitional programming would help reduce the high recidivism rate in Nevada - which the Department of Prisons estimates to be 70 percent.

"These are community-based programs that transition them into housing, gets them jobs, reunites them with family, gets them signed up for Medicaid," Tiffany said.

Not just any inmate will qualify, Tiffany said.

"We want to make sure it's a very safe program."She said inmates would have to go through three levels -- the prison system, Parole and Probation and the courts -- before being released into the community.