Last month, a former correctional officer of High Desert State Prison was charged with involuntary manslaughter for the shooting death of an inmate in 2014.
It wasn’t the first shooting in a Nevada prison, and it drew a closer investigation of the Nevada Department of Correction’s use of guns inside its prisons.
But overcrowding and lack of staffing may account for some of the DoC's policies. According to a 2015 report by the Nevada Department of Corrections, from 2003 to 2013, while Nevada’s crime rate fell 30 percent, its prison population increased 24 percent.
Howard Skolnik retired from the Nevada Department of Corrections in early 2011. He had served as the director of the department for five years, and before that as the deputy director. His total correctional facility career has spanned 45 years.
“I think part of the problem that has evolved in the last few years have been increased deductions due to health care costs and less take-home pay for the officer which has resulted in a lot of turnover,” he said.
Skolnik said Nevada has the lowest ratio of corrections officer to inmates in the country. He said that because an officer hasn't been killed or hurt in a prison in a long time, everyone believes things are going well in Nevada's prisons and no more money is needed.
“The Department of Corrections, and before that the Department of Prisons, has never been treated well by the Nevada State Legislature,” he told KNPR's State of Nevada.
He said there has been a shift in focus away from programs he believes were valuable to security.
“I’m frankly I little disappointed in the loss of the programming that used to exist," he said, "The reversion to 'security supersedes everything' even in a low-medium or medium security facility I feel that the new director really has his hands full.”
When asked about the use of guns inside prisons such as High Desert State Prison, Skolnik explained that it is a large, max security facility with many areas that can't be reached by weapons.
However, he did say that he doesn't believe rules were followed.
“It sounds to me like policy for that unit was not followed during the course of the shooting,” he said, “It sounds to me like he wasn’t adequately trained and shouldn’t have been placed there in the first place.”
Howard Skolnik, former director, Nevada Department of Corrections