Overtime costs for Nevada's correctional officers continue to grow, despite years of discussion between the prison agency and state leaders about how to curb the problem.

On Thursday, the Interim Finance Committee — a legislative body that approves new state spending when the Legislature is not in session — approved another $4.1 million for overtime costs incurred this year at High Desert State Prison, a facility about an hour's drive from Las Vegas that is Nevada's largest and highest-security prison. 

Even as they OK'd the payments, lawmakers pressed the state's prison leaders on what they were doing to address the crisis. 

Sen. Rochelle Nguyen (D-Las Vegas) told James Dzurenda, director of the Nevada Department of Corrections (NDOC), that she felt like "we're sitting here in a meeting approving different buckets of money every single time, like we're on some sort of hamster wheel that is not integrated into an overall strategic plan."

It's the newest chapter in the well-documented, and oft-lamented, back-and-forth concerning NDOC's sizable overtime payments, which totaled $52 million overall in fiscal year 2026. 

During Thursday's meeting, Dzurenda echoed his past comments in blaming increasing overtime on staffing vacancies and poor conditions in prisons — including increases in violence, overdoses and chronic medical issues among inmates — which force officers to shuffle around more often. Last year, a staffing study found that Nevada prison facilities were severely understaffed — particularly in medical departments — and recommended the state fill the gap by hiring 800 new officers. 

Dzurenda also complained that the Legislature does not authorize funding for anticipated overtime costs before those costs are incurred, unlike in other states, saying this approach makes it harder to plan a realistic annual budget.

"We get a budget for staffing, and these overtime costs are all because of unprecedented and unpredicted overtime that now I have to pay for, that I don't get budgeted for," he said. 

Multiple previous state audits — including one released last summer and others released decades ago — have found that at least some of the overtime payments stem from lax internal pay policies that resulted in multimillion-dollar errors. Prison leaders have pledged in the past to implement better payroll measures to limit overtime, but subsequent audits have found they failed to follow through on those changes.

Most recently, an audit on the timesheets submitted at High Desert from July 2025 to June 2026 found systemic issues in overtime payments, with the auditors blaming poor oversight and ambiguous rules for thousands of instances where managers failed to find or flag errors on employees' timesheets.

Paul Lunkwitz, president of the correctional officers' union in Las Vegas, has repeatedly called for improvements to attract more applicants to prison jobs. He said in an interview that the payroll inconsistencies in the High Desert audit were minor compared with the larger problems at hand: chronic understaffing and burnout in Nevada's prisons. 

Among other reforms, Lunkwitz wants officers to work 12-hour shifts rather than eight-hour ones, a change also recommended in the 2025 staffing report, but never implemented. 

"If you don't do these things to try to correct the problem, attract good employees, keep and retain good employees, offer good competitive benefits — if you're not doing those things, we're going to keep running into this," he said. "They keep making every excuse in the book to not address the problem."

How did Nevada get here?

The $4.1 million was all for High Desert, but it's not the only prison that has huge overtime costs. The department's total budgetary shortfall due to overtime was $38 million in fiscal year 2026, according to NDOC spokesperson Teri Vance. 

Other prisons were able to cover those costs by moving money around; the $4 million was too large for High Desert to cover itself, documents submitted by NDOC show. 

At the legislative meeting, Dzurenda described High Desert as "where the violence is" and outlined a vicious cycle: The facility being short-staffed means an increased chance of violence between inmates, he said, which results in injured inmates needing to visit hospitals more often and officers needing to leave their posts to accompany them. 

Lawmakers expressed frustration that NDOC was asking for funding again — echoing their criticisms last session at the department's last-minute request for funds to fill a $45 million budget hole in fiscal year 2025, also resulting from overtime. 

"Do you anticipate that this time you will have a more accurate version of what those overtime costs are going to be?" asked Nguyen. "So we don't have to scramble to find those overtime costs when we are in the middle of the session?"

Dzurenda said it would be difficult to guarantee that overtime costs will be any more predictable this year, primarily because of the rising rates of overdoses among inmates. 

"If we don't control the drugs coming into the facilities, those overtime costs are going to be unprecedented," he responded to Nguyen. 

He blamed these overdoses on the availability of new drugs — such as K2, or "spice," a synthetic form of marijuana sometimes laced with fentanyl — and urged lawmakers once again to reverse a requirement, enacted in a 2023 law, that mail be physically delivered to inmates. Prison leaders have said in multiple legislative meetings that that policy allows drugs to secretly slip into facilities. 

Medical staffing is another key reason overtime costs continue to rise. 

Because Nevada's prison facilities are struggling to hire doctors and nurses, they must send prisoners to external providers for treatment instead — a move that legally requires correctional officers to travel with prisoners, putting additional strain on staff. In fiscal year 2024, the agency incurred more than 90,000 overtime hours for transporting inmates to medical visits and hospital stays. 

"We don't have many people banging down my doors in medical to work in a prison," Dzurenda said. "But it's also in these rural areas — I just can't get the staff. I don't even think they can in the local hospitals there." 

Dzurenda said to reduce overtime payments, the Legislature must approve new positions at High Desert and other prisons. In the meantime, he said the agency was experimenting with more innovative approaches to healthcare — such as virtual check-ups for patients with chronic conditions — and has had to cut back on some services, including special programs and visitation hours for inmates.

Lawmakers expressed some discomfort at that move, but Dzurenda said it's necessary to meet the bare minimum staffing requirements to keep inmates safe and said he hopes to reverse those policies in the future. 

Vance, the NDOC spokesperson, noted in her statement to The Indy that the Legislature in 2025 funded dozens of new positions at High Desert State Prison. Those positions were not officially staffed until April of this year, meaning their potentially beneficial effect on overtime hours would not have materialized yet. 

Systemic errors in overtime payments?

Multiple prior state audits, going back to at least 2018, have documented inadequate oversight of overtime costs and personnel practices. 

The recent audit of overtime payments at High Desert found similar issues, concluding that officials had failed to adequately review officers' timesheets, which frequently had "inconsistent interpretations" of work rules and "recurring errors" concerning overtime. 

Vance wrote in her statement that the audit of payroll practices has expanded to Northern Nevada Correctional Center and will eventually examine all of the state's prison facilities. She said the department is going to follow "all recommendations" of the audit and is expanding its "training and accountability" programs on pay practices.

The report on High Desert blames some of the erroneous payments on ambiguities in the contract between NDOC and its officers' union and recommends greater monitoring of timesheets going forward, including requiring prison wardens to sign off on all timesheets.

Some of the report's findings related to muster pay, the practice in place since 2023 that gives correctional officers in Nevada an additional 45 minutes of overtime per day. The money is intended to compensate officers for time spent entering and leaving prison shifts, including going through security, preparing for the day and receiving new assignments. 

The report criticized the officers' union contract for using wide discretion in its definition of muster pay, allowing officers to receive the additional compensation even in situations that appeared out-of-bounds — such as signing into a hospital to meet a prisoner, rather than entering a shift at a facility; attending trainings outside of facilities; and attending law enforcement ceremonies. 

Overall, the report found that narrowing the eligibility for muster pay could save the prison more than $200,000 per year. 

In a separate instance, an officer was accidentally paid at the muster pay rate — a higher, special overtime rate — for his full two weeks of work, resulting in an overpayment of more than $6,000. Supervisors failed to catch the error and the employee never reported the discrepancy.

Muster pay is a significant share of overall overtime costs, adding up to more than $13 million across the department in fiscal year 2026. 

At High Desert specifically, NDOC data shows that muster pay was the single biggest contributor to the prison's overtime payments, accounting for $4 million of the $15 million the facility spent on overtime in 2026.