The prison system is eating up steadily larger chunks of the state budget and preventing more from being spent on priorities such as education, warn critics, who range from the state Supreme Court to the American Civil Liberties Union. They say new approaches should be taken to curb growing prison populations and spiraling costs.

"We need to look at whether we're being smart about the way we punish and incarcerate inmates in this state," Nevada Supreme Court Justice James Hardesty said. "If we do nothing to re-evaluate our criminal justice system, we will consume a lot of the state's budget simply incarcerating people and building prisons."

Gary Peck, executive director of the Nevada ACLU, said legislators continue to unquestioningly pursue a "lock 'em up and throw away the key approach" at the expense of other priorities.

"What they did wasn't smart from a public policy perspective; it wasn't smart in terms of enhancing public safety; it wasn't smart in terms of responsibly managing the budget," Peck said of the recently concluded biennial legislative session. "There was a limited pot of money and everybody knew that. To the extent that they were going to spend a substantial amount to fund new prisons, there was going to be substantially less to fund everything else."

Hardesty, Peck and others say it would be both fiscally and socially more responsible to spend money on programs to prevent people from committing crimes and to rehabilitate them in prison so they don't commit more crimes once they're released.

In addition, they say the state's criminal laws often impose long sentences and send people to prison who don't belong there, because legislators are eager to seem "tough on crime" without considering the financial consequences.

Peck particularly objected to the new construction funding, which he said legislators should have done more to question and curtail.

But from the prison system's perspective, it would have been irresponsible for the Legislature not to meet its needs. When an inmate is sent to the Department of Corrections, the agency has no choice but to take that person, noted Fritz Schlottman, the department's administrator for offender management.

"We had to have what we asked for to keep up with the growth of the state," Schlottman said. Crime rates nationally, he noted, have gone up in the past two years after a more-than-decadelong downswing.

He attributed that to the "echo boom" generation coming into its peak years for criminal activity, a demographic inevitability that means that "we're going to have a string of years where crime is going to go up."

Schlottman said the state could face a lawsuit if prison overcrowding continues. But Peck called that notion a canard. If anyone sued, it would be the ACLU, which has no plans to do so, Peck said.

The state's prison population stands at about 13,000 inmates. The prison construction funding includes:

• $66 million to add 400 beds to the Southern Nevada Women's Correctional Center in North Las Vegas

• $56 million to expand and renovate the minimum-security Indian Springs Conservation Camp

• $53 million to add about 600 beds to the medium-security High Desert State Prison, also in Indian Springs

• $65 million for planning and to add about 600 beds to Southern Desert Correctional Center, another medium-security prison in Indian Springs

• $30 million for four prefab housing units to be positioned as temporary housing at facilities around the state; each unit represents 240 medium-security beds

• $13 million to complete an expansion of High Desert that was already under way

• Nearly $10 million in planning funds, including about $8 million for "Prison 8," a new medium-security facility slated to open in Indian Springs in 2010.

The Corrections Department's operating budget, meanwhile, went from $423 million in the last biennium to $539 million in the current one, an increase of 27.3 percent, according to Budget Director Andrew Clinger. Corrections went from being 7.3 percent of the state operating budget to 7.9 percent.

The prison population is expected to increase 61 percent by 2017, to more than 22,000, according to James Austin, a consultant the state hired to project inmate numbers. Those projections were based on current trends continuing. If the operating budget increased by the same proportion, the state will be spending $681 million on corrections operations in the 2017 biennium.

That's apart from $1.6 billion in projected construction costs through 2015.

"I was, as a justice of this court and a taxpayer in this state, shocked by the potential fiscal impact," Hardesty said.

The temporary units being funded, he said, are unsafe and "a waste of money" since they will eventually be abandoned.

He added, "Frankly, that money would have been much better channeled into drug courts and other specialty courts that address the underlying problem, and that is methamphetamine addiction."

Prison funding was something of a political football during the legislative session. Assembly Democrats clamoring for more funding particularly for education repeatedly, when asked where the money would come from, questioned the big ticket for prisons.

But they never made a dent in the capital funding. Assemblywoman Sheila Leslie, D-Reno, said it wasn't a major point in the budget negotiations because the Democrats resigned themselves to the idea that the funding was necessary.

"Our financial people said, 'You're not going to get anything this fiscal year from the prison budget. The prison population is going up, and you have to address that.' We really had no choice."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno, said as a former prosecutor, he was "not ready to deal too leniently" with criminals, and, he said, the state's growth is responsible for most of the inmate increase. But he also endorsed looking at ways to bring down the prison population.

"People who commit crimes need to be punished," he said. "The question is whether you have some kind of flexibility, and I agree with that. I think judges should have more discretion. I think you also need more alternatives to hard time."

But in the near term, he said, those new prison beds have to be built. "We're not going to accomplish it overnight," he said of attempts to reduce the number of inmates.

Leslie, who works for the Washoe County Mental Health Court program, also said system reforms are needed to reduce future prison population growth. She said more money should go to addiction and mental health treatment to keep people out of prison, and sentences should be examined to try to ensure they are appropriate.

She noted that the 2007 Legislature made some strides toward that end, such as giving judges more discretion in the length of enhancements added to sentences because of aggravating factors and increasing the good-time credits available to inmates.

The latter measure could allow 1,000 to 1,500 inmates to be paroled right away, relieving some of the current overcrowding. That allowed inmate projections to be reduced slightly and about $3 million rerouted from prisons to the Interim Finance Committee to put toward programs to keep people out of prison, Leslie said.

The Legislature also created a new Commission on the Administration of Justice to look at sentencing laws and make recommendations. There had previously been a Sentencing Commission, but it had failed to meet for several years, even though lawmakers were appointed to it.

Hardesty also noted those changes, as well as a measure he pushed for that will deport illegal immigrant prisoners back to their home countries if they are first-time felons who committed nonviolent offenses. That will remove almost 500 current prisoners, he said.

But running counter to those efforts is the Legislature's propensity for creating new felonies, laws that may look good on campaign ads but have the effect of putting more people behind bars, increasing prison costs while not enhancing public safety, the ACLU contends.

Laws passed in 2007 created a "video voyeurism" felony, a graffiti felony, a felony for signing an initiative petition with the wrong name and a sentence enhancement for crimes against anyone 60 or older.

"Symbolic statements like that cost a lot of money," the ACLU's Richard Siegel said.

The Corrections Department doesn't take a position on whether criminal sentences are appropriate, leaving that up to policymakers, Schlottman said.

"Every two years the Legislature meets and votes to increase penalties and add new crimes," he said.

"Our political leaders in this state clearly don't think penalties are severe enough."