Advocates celebrate as Nevada cuts prison commissary markups

Advocates for prisoners in Nevada are celebrating the “historic” passage of a new state regulation that decreases prison commissary sale markups on items from a maximum of 66% to 35%.

Before the reduction, Nevada’s prisons had some of the highest commissary markups of any prison system in the United States, according to the Fines and Fees Justice Center.

Commissaries in prisons sell items found in most grocery and retail stores, from clothes and personal hygiene items to electronics like headphones. Most importantly, commissaries sell food to offenders, allowing them to supplement their diet with nutrients the prison’s contentious food standards may not give them.

The previous 66% markup on items made basic foods significantly more expensive than they would be outside of prison. For example, a 20-ounce bag of cereal goes for $8 and a small bag of frozen vegetables for almost $7, according to a commissary sales list from February.

The 66% markup usually adds $2-$6 to the average prison commissary purchase, but small increases like that represent large chunks of offenders’ income due to their low wages while incarcerated. While some inmates make $20 a week as clerks or porters, others make35 cents an hour, which can make an extra $5 on a purchase devastating.

“They’re making 30 bucks a month, and they don’t get enough food to even stave off hunger, let alone deal with nutrition,” said Jodi Hocking, founder of the Nevada prison advocacy group Return Strong. “Half the time, you’re just trying to not go to bed and have your stomach growling and keep you awake all night.”

When offenders can afford food, the cheapest available is often the least nutritious. At67 cents, Top Ramen is one of the most affordable foods in prison commissaries — and one serving has over 1,500 milligrams of sodium, 66% of a person’s daily intake. Nearly a million cups were sold between July and December of 2023 alone, representing more than a third of all food sales in Nevada’s prisons.

Offenders being financially cut off from healthier food options, coupled with the state-provided meals — which have made headlines for their lack of nutrition — exacerbate preexisting health conditions, advocates say. Over half of all offenders have a preexisting condition, and offenders are more than twice as likely to have health issues like asthma and hepatitis C, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The combination of poor nutrition and the difficulty in accessing health care after leaving incarceration creates a perfect storm that burdens public health care, advocates say.

“They’re coming home, and what we’re doing by not feeding people nutritious, high-quality food while they’re in prison is creating a rollover public health crisis,” Hocking said. “So, this is one battle, but it is not the war.”

With the markups now lowered, offenders will have easier access to healthier items, along with a wider variety, a quality-of-life change some are hoping will have additional effects for the prison environment.

“It has a calming effect inside the prisons, right? People having some of this access, and they’re very creative in the types of food they make when they buy these things, it creates this level of normalcy,” said Nick Shepack, Nevada director for the Fines and Fees Justice Center.

The reason the commissary markups became so high in the first place was not an intentional move by department officials, Shepack said, but rather decades of growing pressure from the Legislature for NDOC to offset some of its budgetary needs.

“So by shifting the cost from the general fund slowly, it’s really a piecemeal thing,” Shepack said. “It wasn’t like one giant, like, ‘Now you have to pay all this;’ it was like, ‘We can save a buck here one session, and then here.’ ”

The lowering of the commissary markups, although quickly passed Friday through the Legislative Commission, doubled as an equally significant sign of legislative success for advocates. In 2023, Return Strong and Fines and Fees worked with legislators to pass Senate Bill 105, which made the Department of Corrections subject to the Nevada Administrative Procedure Act.

Previously, the department had been exempt from the state’s usual administrative rulemaking process, making administrative regulations passed through the Board of State Prison Commissioners the only way to alter prison policy without legislation. The board has four members: the governor, the secretary of state, the attorney general and the director of the Department of Corrections.

Administrative regulations would be sent and approved solely by the board, making community input much more difficult. The size and lack of input contributed to the higher markups, quickly approved by the board.

“Every once in a while, they push back on some stuff, but they’ve been mostly like a rubber stamp,” Shepack said. “Something that happens when you have just a percentage flat markup is as the items got more expensive, the revenue on each item grew, and they never had a conversation about what the markup should be.”

The commissary markup reduction is the first time the new administrative process has been used for the Department of Corrections, and Hocking said the yearlong project was proof that advocacy working toward long-term fixes for the prisons works.

“It was interesting, because what we’ve always been told is that it was a safety and security risk for NDOC to have to go through this type of process to be transparent,” Hocking said.

Hocking and Shepack also both underscored the significance of the regulation’s ability to allow prison officials to lower the markups in the future if necessary without approval — but if they want to increase markups, officials would need to get commission approval.

The final piece of the puzzle for the new regulation is the requirement that the Inmate Welfare Account — where profit from commissary markups goes — only maintains a six-month reserve. The fund had at one point ballooned to over $14 million, Shepack said. With the new reserve rule in place, Shepack foresees excess funds being put toward buying more items and lowering the markups even further.

“The 35% is too high. I’m happy to say that it is still higher than we believe it should be,” Shepack said. “But that’s also why we built in this six-month reserve in the administrative regulation, because if they continue to make as much money as they are, it’s going to have to trigger them to lower the prices.”

With the lower markups set to start in the coming weeks, Hocking said the payoff for the combination of legislation and administrative regulation is not just a financial victory for offenders, but a net win for Nevada.

“You can’t separate finances and financial decisions of what happens with people who are incarcerated, and what happens with families, and how that really becomes a public health thing,” Hocking said.

 

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