He suggested someone might drive under the influence of cocaine, beat his wife and steal up to $1,000 from a store before the activity would rise beyond a misdemeanor and trigger a parole revocation. Jackson questioned the bill’s requirement that parole officers use escalating punishments, rather than revoking their parole, when people make “technical” parole violations - actions that don’t rise to the level of a gross misdemeanor or felony.Still, opponents took issue with a number of the particulars: to generate meaningful, substantive data that it provides direction and analysis of where we are in our criminal justice system,” he said. “One of the recurring problems that has existed in the 12 years that I've been associated with the advisory commission is the inability. Nevada Supreme Court Justice James Hardesty said the data analysis has identified the trends in the system, laying a firm foundation for policy changes that never gained traction in past sessions.
“We have … really undergone a creep of our ongoing enhancement of penalties,” said Lisa Rasmussen of Nevada Attorneys for Criminal Justice, “making things more severe to the point where Nevada has become an outlier in many of the areas that this bill addresses.” The length of sentences has also been creeping up in recent years - something critics say comes because lawmakers decide piecemeal each session to raise penalties for certain crimes but haven’t stepped back to examine the big picture. They told members of the Advisory Commission on Administration of Justice during the interim that several factors are driving up Nevada’s prison population while other states are seeing declines.Ībout two thirds of people behind bars are there for crimes not committed against another person, and the number of women and people with mental illness in prison has risen sharply. Researchers with the Crime and Justice Institute helped develop the recommendations after combing through data from Nevada’s prisons and sifting through case files in the back rooms of courthouses. “To do so would erode the public's confidence in law enforcement, and law abiding citizens would lose faith in the criminal justice system.” “Simply stated, criminal justice reform should not sacrifice public safety,” cautioned Douglas County District Attorney Mark Jackson. They deserve much better.”īut the bill has hit a wall of opposition from prosecutors and law enforcement, who warn of aging pedophiles walking free, tourist-repelling levels of property crime and impunity for drug traffickers who are fueling the opioid crisis. “The approach has more often been to warehouse an offender. “In Nevada, the criminal justice system has too often not been a system of corrections, so much as a system of incarceration without doing much meaningful to correct the drivers of criminal behavior,” Democratic Assemblyman Steve Yeager told the Assembly Judiciary Committee that he chairs at a four-hour hearing for AB236 on Friday. It enshrines six months of analysis and 25 recommendations developed after Department of Justice officials, at state leaders’ request, designated Nevada a Justice Reinvestment Initiative state and offered up the services of a team of data and policy analysts. Their 136-page bill - which proponents say could save the state $640 million in prison costs over a decade - calls for everything from reducing penalties for certain kinds of burglaries to lowering barriers for offenders to enroll in drug or mental health treatment-focused programs as an alternative to incarceration. More than two decades after the last major overhaul of criminal sentencing in Nevada, lawmakers armed with data from a monthslong research project are taking up what the bill sponsor calls “probably the single most important and transformative criminal justice bill in the history of this building.”