Civil rights advocates say the bill could reverse justice reforms, grow prison populations, and put strain on the corrections system.

Amid a budget crisis, severe staffing shortages, and crumbling infrastructure at the Nevada Department of Corrections (NDOC), Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo introduced Senate Bill 457 (SB457)—a sweeping 84-page crime bill that critics warn could drive up incarceration rates.

The bill proposes harsher penalties for a range of offenses, including stalking, child sexual abuse, car burglaries, domestic violence, and deadly DUIs. It lowers the felony theft threshold, creates two- and three-strike laws at the discretion of judges and prosecutors, and allows law enforcement to testify on behalf of witnesses in cases involving child abuse or domestic violence.

“Imagine going to court where the only evidence against you is a secondhand story and you have no right to challenge it,” Clark County Public Defender Paloma Guerrero told the Senate Judiciary during opposition testimony on Wednesday. “If we allow this, we wouldn’t even know if the state had their witnesses.”

The bill, first heard this week during the final days of the legislative session, was criticized by civil rights attorneys and public defenders who claimed Lombardo’s office had avoided collaboration with them despite their status as key stakeholders in the industry. Some Democrat lawmakers made the same assertion, assuring that they would work with Lombardo’s office on the proposal if given the chance.

Critics questioned the feasibility and cost of the bill, which NDOC estimates would require more than $42 million in additional funding over the next two years. Despite a decline in the prison population from over 14,000 in 2017 to just above 10,000 today, NDOC is facing a $53 million deficit—largely due to overtime. 

A conceptual amendment was also shared on the day of its presentation, which would remove major sections of the bill and shift funding from the state’s general fund to the NDOC to cover the estimated cost.

Still, advocates argue the bill is unscalable, pointing to nationwide staffing shortages that have led to increased prison lockdowns and reduced rehabilitation programming.

“The solution cannot be continuing to engage in lockdowns for people who are incarcerated, that we ultimately end up releasing back into society, and hope that things are just going to improve,” said Athar Haseebullah, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada. “Hope is not a strategy here.” 

This isn’t the first time Lombardo has sought to push through a major crime bill. 

In 2023, the Democrat-led legislature whittled down a similarly lengthy proposal from his office that would have dismantled criminal justice reforms enacted in 2019—a key motivator behind Lombardo’s crime bills, according to John Piro, Clark County Public Defender. The reforms were introduced to curb the rapidly growing prison population, which was straining the state’s correctional budget.

Piro said that to understand the consequences of SB457 as proposed in NELIS, lawmakers can simply refer back to prison data from 2016. 

He said before the 2019 reforms under Assembly Bill 236, the Nevada Advisory Commission on the Administration of Justice (ACAJ) reportedly found that the state had the 15th highest incarceration rate in the nation in 2016 — a third of whom had mental health issues. The study also highlighted that nonviolent offenders made up 66% of prison admissions in 2017, and Nevada was No. 1 in imprisoning women at 43% above the national average.

“Longer prison sentences are not a deterrent to crime,” Piro said. “If they were, America would be the safest place in the whole wide world, because we have more people in prisons than any other nation that is similar to us.”