Prison time

The issue of prison overcrowding, particularly as it relates to the state budget, garnered a fair amount of attention in Carson City during the 2007 legislative session.

The Nevada prison system now holds 13,000 inmates, but that is expected to increase by 57 percent in the next decade. A skyrocketing prison population could eventually overwhelm taxpayers.

But while lawmakers did redirect a fair amount of capital toward prison construction, and approved Assembly Bill 510, which expands good-time credits for some inmates, even supporters of these measures admit they are stop-gap solutions.

Thus we have the Advisory Commission on the Administration of Justice, which held its first meeting this week. The panel, chaired by state Supreme Court Justice Jim Hardesty, was created by the Legislature to “evaluate the entire criminal justice system from beginning to end” with an eye on reducing the number of inmates in the Nevada system.

“We should do something about this problem, once and for all,” said Justice Hardesty.

Fine. But any serious discussion of doing “something about this problem” must begin and end with two issues: how we deal with nonviolent offenders and how we deal with illegals in the system.

In fact, it was Justice Hardesty himself who in February testified before an Assembly panel that, “A release of 500 inmates to deportation could save the state nearly $10 million in annual occupancy costs.”

Let’s hope he makes this issue an important part of the panel’s work.

In addition, the exploding prison population — in Nevada and around the nation — is largely due to the confinement of nonviolent criminals, most busted for drug offenses.

Between 1978 and 1997, the percentage of violent offenders in American prisons actually declined from 57 percent to 47 percent, according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.

And when it comes to females, the center estimates that 85 percent of the women behind bars in this country are there for drug-related crimes.

Everybody will agree that the real bad guys — the killers, the rapists, the predators, the hard-core repeat criminals — must be locked up. But if Justice Hardesty’s commission is to do more than produce a report that serves as an attractive bookend, it will have to have the courage to finally propose realistic sentencing alternatives for the great majority of nonviolent offenders.

And that may lead to some politically controversial suggestions.