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Families and advocates urge NDOC to provide downloadable HIPAA form, fix grievance delays and review disciplinary decisions
Summary
Multiple public commenters urged NDOC to make hospital-notification HIPAA forms easily available online, to repair a backlog in grievance processing they say leads to legal and program harms, and to review specific disciplinary cases they say were mishandled.
Several family members, formerly incarcerated individuals and advocates used the public comment period to ask the Board to improve family notification, fix grievance procedures and review individual disciplinary decisions.
Tonja Brown, an inmate advocate, asked the Board to authorize a downloadable HIPAA authorization form on the Nevada Department of Corrections website so families can sign and update authorizations quickly. "No family should be the last to know that a medical emergency has occurred," she said, arguing readily accessible forms would reduce fear and delays in notification.
Dorothy Jackson described a specific disciplinary case involving her son, saying an emergency grievance and staff statements identified another inmate as responsible for a discovered cellular phone but that her son was found guilty at a disciplinary hearing. She asked the Board to review the conviction, restore statutory time lost, and reconsider her son’s program eligibility.
Larry Plumlee urged NDOC to fix the grievance procedure, calling it chronically delayed and linking delayed grievances to lawsuits and extended incarceration. He also warned families about costs associated with requiring digital mail: "for one letter to be sent it costs 20 cents plus a $6.90 cent fee to ViaPath," he said. Plumlee asked the department to address broken grievance timelines and noted earlier plans to hire an ombudsman to help resolve problems.
Nathanial Williams, who said he spent 22 years incarcerated, alleged numerous examples of denied medical care and raised questions about causes of death, stating, "Some of these situations are from K2 but to my knowledge, K2 doesn’t kill people. Fentanyl does." He also listed several inmate deaths and alleged cases of medical neglect.
Board members did not take formal action on these individual requests during the meeting; public commenters asked the Board and NDOC leadership to investigate, correct disciplinary findings where appropriate and expedite grievance reforms.
