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The root cause of overcrowding within Nebraska's prison system is "legislative changes" brought by state lawmakers in the last 15-20 years that have extended the average sentence duration of inmates in state custody, according to the state-commissioned report from the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

And researchers made clear that expansions of prison capacity will "only provide a short-term fix," according to drafted by researchers at UNO's Nebraska Center for Justice Research who warned that without sentencing reform and other legislative solutions, "additional, expensive prison expansions will be required routinely."

The 139-page reportÌý— which the Legislature set aside money for in 2021, two years before lawmakers approved the construction of a new $350 million, 1,500-bed prison last yearÌý— only reinforced the beliefs of Sen. Terrell McKinney of Omaha, who has been the Legislature's leading opponent of the prison's construction and an advocate for substantive criminal justice reform.

"I think it highlighted what many of us have been saying for the past three years — that we can’t build our way out of the situation," McKinney said last week. "We have to make some policy changes.�

The average daily population within Nebraska's prisons climbed from around 5,300 inmates in early 2017 to a peak of around 5,700 inmates by March 2020, when the pandemic momentarily slowed the state's justice system to a crawl, according to data laid out in the report.

The decrease in arrivals at state prisons coupled with the normal churn of departures saw the department's average daily inmate population drop to around 5,300 again by March 2021.

But in the years since, the population has reboundedÌý— nearing the same pre-pandemic peak and leaving the Department of Correctional Services with roughly 1,500 more inmates in its custody than the state's prisons are designed to house.

Meanwhile, admissions into Nebraska's prisons have remained relatively stable, according to the report, indicating the culprit for the state's mounting prison overcrowding crisis is not over-policing.

Instead, researchers attributed much of the crowding to a slowÌýgrowth of incarcerated individuals’ "average days to release"Ìý— the product of increased sentence lengths for those entering state custody.

The average time remaining on Nebraska inmates' prison sentences increased by nearly 400 days between September 2017 and March 2022, according to the report.

In 2017, the average inmate in Nebraska's prisons was three years and four months away from release. By March 2022, that average had ballooned by a full year.

The report makes clear who is at fault for such a sharp increase in such a short time frame: Nebraska lawmakers, who, both broadly and incrementally, have increased minimum sentence lengths for a host of crimes over the last two decades, manufacturing the overcrowding crisis the state faces now.

Part of the prison population's increase can be traced toÌýtougher penalties for gun crimes passed by the Legislature in 2009 in response to an epidemic of gang violence in Omaha’s inner city.

In the decade after lawmakers increased penalties for gun and assault convictions, the number of inmates whose most serious offense was a gun crime leapt from 85 to 777 — an increase of more than 800%, .

Researchers, too, pointed to a handful of incremental sentencing enhancements that lawmakers have passed over the last decade that, the report suggests, have undermined the efficacy of LB605, a criminal justice reform bill the Legislature passed in 2015 in an effort to reduce overcrowding.

Researchers highlighted seven laws passed between 2015 and 2018 that brought increased penalties for pandering, prostitution, human or labor trafficking, assaulting police officers and sexually assaulting or sexually contacting students, in some cases making felonies out of former misdemeanors.Ìý

And Legislators created new offenses forÌýthreatening someone via text or email,Ìýdistributing a private image of another person and grooming while defining health care officials as peace officers, making it a felony to strike them, too.

The demonstrable increase in inmates' average sentencesÌý— attributed in part also to judges ordering defendants convicted of multiple crimes to serve their sentences consecutivelyÌý— has created a "cascading effect" within the state's prison system, according to the report.

That effect has ensured fewer individuals are eligible for parole, which has in turn reduced departures from state prisons, which causes crowding and system "bottlenecks" that have left some inmates incarcerated in housing units with a higher security level than necessary, where there is "greater potential for serious and violent infraction behavior," researchers said.

“I think the problem was a generation of lawmakers running on the premise that they were going to be tough on crime," said former Sen. Steve Lathrop, who chaired the Legislature's Judiciary Committee from 2019 to 2022 after a prior stint as a senator from 2007 to 2014.

Lathrop, who was in the Legislature when lawmakers passed 2009's consequential gun bill, largely blamed conservative politics and fear-mongering prosecutors for the state of the state's prisons.

He pointed to the testimony of law enforcement officials who have routinely opposed substantive sentencing reform as an underlying cause of the Legislature's unwillingness to address the root of the overcrowding problem.

Prosecutors in 2015 held multiple news conferences to lodge opposition to a provision of LB605 that would have lowered minimum sentences in certain felony convictions to one-third of the maximum sentence, incentivizing inmates to participate in programming to seek parole.

“That’s the problem. That's the difficulty," Lathrop said. "The people that oppose any kind of reform efforts are the prosecutors and law enforcement. And they come from Omaha and ... and they come from the county attorneys (offices) and they come down to Lincoln and tell people that this is gonna be the end of the world.

"But none of the counties where these prosecutors work or the law enforcement agencies have to pay for the incarceration for these individuals. They don't have a stake in this problem."

One suggestion offered by UNO's researchers would change that.

Their report notes that "short timers," orÌýinmates who enter state custody with less than a year before their release date,Ìýaccount for 10% of Nebraska's prison population and are more likely to have been convicted of drug crimes or other nonviolent offenses than other inmates.

While their time in state custody is relatively briefÌý— often because they are in custody on a parole violation or were sent to prison with a short initial sentence combined with credit for time they served while incarcerated in a county jail prior to their convictionÌý— short timers now represent more than half of new admissions to Nebraska prisons, according to the report.

And a "substantial portion" of short timers often spend their entire sentence at the prison system's reception facility in Lincoln, where they aren't able to engage in work release and have limited access to programming.

Short timers also disrupt the designed flow of transfers and promotions to lower custody units for inmates with longer terms, preventing effective transitions back into society, according to the report.

Researchers recommended lawmakers consider allowing short timers to serve at least a portion of their sentence in their local county jail or in other alternative housing solutions, reducing the bottleneck and crowding problems they bring to state prisons while allowing inmates greater access to services.

The report suggests that such a policy changeÌý— which Ìý— would reduce the state's prison population to around 5,000 and allow the state to avoid building might be necessary.

It's unclear if lawmakers will heed the researchers' advice.

UNO's report, which the state paid $200,000 to commission, marks the fifth time in the last decade that the state has sought reports on Nebraska's prison system from external agencies.

"And they have ignored all of them," quipped McKinney, who passed out copies of UNO's research brief to his colleagues in the Legislature last week with hopes that they read it and take it seriously, he said.

But McKinney — who along with his colleagues on the Judiciary Committee will consider a handful of bills this legislative session that would add new substances to the list of prohibited drugs in Nebraska and one that would enhance penalties for fatal car crashesÌý— is clear-eyed about the route to reform.

"Any effort to do anything gets pushback," he said. "And it doesn’t matter, in my opinion, who comes in and studies the system. Until we get politics out of the conversation, we’re never gonna do anything because you have those individuals who, because of politics, don’t want to do much.

"And you could have conversations with these people off the record and they’ll tell you it’s a problem and we need to do something about it, but when it comes to taking those votes, it doesn’t happen.�