Prison money could be used for two work training facilities

Friday, April 12, 2002 | 11:09 a.m.

A governor's study committee wants to divert $6 million of state funds earmarked for expansion of a medium security prison to build two inmate work training facilities in Southern Nevada.

The plan could save taxpayers $9 million up front and reduce inmate recidivism by 50 percent, officials said.

The Corrections Study Committee unveiled the plan Thursday but took no action. It is expected to further consider the proposal in May and, if the plan is approved, send it to Gov. Kenny Guinn.

"We want to better utilize existing and committed resources," Nevada Department of Corrections Assistant Director Howard Skolnick said after the meeting. "The governor formed this committee and I believe supports its efforts to find alternatives to hard beds (maximum security cells), which are expensive to build and staff."

The Nevada Legislature approved $15 million to build two additional units with 500 beds at the High Desert State Prison.

The committee's plan recommends instead the construction of a 600-bed minimum security work center at the Southern Desert Correctional Center at Indian Springs for $6 million.

Inmates with two to three years remaining on their sentences would be eligible for the center, which would save the system $9 million in construction costs. Additionally, the extra 100 beds could be rented out to other states or the federal government to subsidize the programs at the work center, the committee said.

The committee also recommended contracting a private firm to build a 300-plus bed re-entry center in Las Vegas for nonviolent inmates with two years or less to serve on their sentences. Such transitional housing still would be a prison, but the inmates would have freedoms like working full time in the community, some unsupervised. That facility would be funded and run by the rents paid from the inmates' salaries.

Currently such programs are open exclusively to inmates with 18 months or less to go on their sentences. Expanding that time restriction would make an additional 500 inmates eligible for reclassification to minimum-risk status and eligible to be transferred to the training centers, Skolnick said.

"The idea used to be to lock them up, throw away the key and make their lives miserable," said Jackie Crawford, director of the Nevada Department of Corrections, who also is a committee member. "Today we are looking at a different culture."

The work center at the Indian Springs prison would house inmates at $20.93 apiece per day, compared with the $30.12 per day to house each of the 1,800 inmates at the High Desert State Prison. It would cost $17.96 per day to house an inmate at the re-entry center at a Las Vegas site to be determined.

To further increase savings, parole and probation violators would be taken to the re-entry center instead of a state prison, officials said. Both centers also would provide drug counseling and other rehabilitation programs.

More Nevada prisoners are kept in expensive medium and maximum security prisons than probably need to be, the committee found.

Eighteen percent of Nevada's 10,000 inmates are classified as maximum risk, while the national average is 11 percent, the committee said. About 60 percent of Nevada's inmates are classified medium risk, while the national average is 43 percent. Just 21 percent of Nevada's inmates are considered minimum risk, compared with the national average of 46 percent.

"This is a new beginning and it is not a novel plan," committee member Dorothy Nash Holmes said. "It is going on all over the country. It is managing in a humane way and it will cost us less to do it. (Inmates) will go out better educated and better skilled and they will not come back."

Crawford estimated there would be a 50 percent reduction in inmates returned to prison for new crimes as a result of the program.

"The old system needs to change," said Dave Anson, a former Nevada prison guard who, as a member of Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 17, is an activist for inmate veterans. "This is a move in the right direction."