Restoration of program funding will cost about $228,000 annually for the program housed within the Division of Parole and Probation. Though lawmakers didn’t comment on the funding restoration during their Thursday meeting, leaders of the state parole division have previously touted the program as an extremely helpful tool in reducing recidivism.

The department reopened visitation for inmates on May 1, with significant safety restrictions in place, including limits on the age of visitors, number of allowed visitors per inmate and physical contact between inmates and visitors. Those restrictions have left some Nevadans feeling reluctant to visit their incarcerated loved ones.

“The lingering question about AB395 is whether the governor is going to be supportive, and so I know that he’s expressed publicly some concerns about it,” Scheible said in an interview on Wednesday. “If the sponsor can work with him to address those concerns and bring me an amendment, that would be an important step in the process, otherwise I’m still evaluating it.”

The Nevada Department of Corrections (NDOC) on Wednesday announced a phased approach for reopening visitation for inmates, beginning on May 1 with COVID-19 safety restrictions in place and then dependent on vaccination levels at individual facilities.

Nevada Department of Corrections (NDOC) Director Charles Daniels announced Tuesday that the department is planning to reopen visitation for inmates starting on May 1. The department originally suspended visitation on March 7, 2020, when there were growing concerns that COVID-19 could be spread to the state’s prison population.

Attorney General Aaron Ford warned Nevadans Monday about scammers selling fraudulent COVID-19 vaccination cards and said “awareness” is the first line of defense against those scams.

Members of the state Senate voted Wednesday to advance a trio of criminal justice reform bills sponsored by Sen. Dallas Harris (D-Las Vegas) that would add more limits on police use of deadly force, require additional recordkeeping on hate crimes and place rate caps on calls made to and from inmates.

The bill faces a more uncertain climate in the Senate, where Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro (D-Las Vegas), who is a prosecutor, would not commit on Tuesday to giving the bill a hearing.

The state Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday morning in a months-long case over an exceptionally close Clark County Commission race, with lawyers arguing whether discrepancies in the voting process met the definition of an election being “prevented.”

Law enforcement agencies do this through a process called civil asset forfeiture, in which police take possession of ill-gotten money or property that may have been involved in a crime. The idea is to thwart criminal organizations and help fund police activity, but a broad range of interest groups have expressed concern in past years that the system easily leads to abuse and the inappropriate taking of property from people not directly involved with criminal activity.

Many of the same arguments from 2003 reappeared on Wednesday during a Senate Judiciary committee hearing on SB236, a bill introduced by Sen. Dallas Harris (D-Las Vegas) that would re-start data collection and analysis on traffic stops, and require police departments to implement a system of tracking “bias indicators” for individual officers.

Two major variables for the bill’s future are whether a death penalty ban can survive in the Senate, where two prosecutors hold key leadership positions at the head of the entire Senate and the Senate Judiciary Committee and have the power to kill the bill, and whether Gov. Steve Sisolak would sign such a bill if it makes it to his desk.

“An empty cell is definitely a place where you learn to live without love,” DePalma told lawmakers during a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Friday. “And no one should have to be that way. I don’t care who you are. It would be more humane to put a bullet in someone’s head, it really would.”

The charges, made Wednesday in Las Vegas Justice Court by the attorney general’s office, formalize allegations of theft and false residency statements made by Assefa — an Ethiopian-born immigrant who resigned from the Legislature in January, citing a “mistaken” understanding of residency requirements for holding legislative office.

While Nevada is one of just 13 states to categorize a traffic ticket as a criminal issue, efforts to downgrade it have failed in sessions dating back to at least 2013 and in spite of an interim study on the topic.

Per the bill (and an amendment making minor changes presented Wednesday by Jauregui), the legislation would explicitly authorize a “covered premise” to prohibit most individuals from possessing a firearm on its property without the written consent of the owner. A covered premise means any private business where a large number of people gather — including casinos, churches, shopping malls, stadiums, movie theaters or golf courses.

The investigations “will allow us to effectively determine whether claims of misconduct were one-off instances, isolated, by individual officers, or whether they are symptoms of larger deficiencies with an agency's customs, training and culture,” Ford said.

Even though quotas for tickets or arrests aren’t written down in official policy, representatives of police unions told lawmakers that many agencies still operate under a cultural assumption that the more tickets issued or more arrests made, the better.

Jackson was part of a large group — which included other former inmates and their family members, prisoners’ rights advocates and several Republican senators — who voiced support this week for a new bill that would require NDOC to pay inmate workers a salary equal to the state’s minimum wage.