Nevada Prisons Director Howard Skolnik was in Carson City last week seeking $300 million to build new prisons and cell blocks over the next two years.

Nevada's male prison population stood at 11,761 last year, and it's expected to grow to 18,561 by 2016. The number of female inmates is also growing, and is expected to approach 2,000 by the year 2016.

Quarters are going to get tight.

But Mr. Skolnik appeared taken aback when asked why his department doesn't save tens of millions of dollars -- reducing the need for new cells and prisons at least somewhat-- by simply deporting hundreds of illegal aliens now serving time for non-violent crimes.

In testimony before an Assembly panel last month, state Supreme Court Justice James Hardesty said more effort should be put into deporting the illegal aliens. "A release of 500 inmates to deportation could save the state nearly $10 million in annual occupancy costs," Justice Hardesty advised.

If such deported inmates returned to Nevada and were apprehended, they would have to serve any additional or remaining sentence in a federal institution -- an obvious savings to the state of Nevada -- Justice Hardesty told the committee.

And the number "500" may be just the tip of the iceberg.

Hardesty told lawmakers there are more than 1,000 illegal immigrants now in the prison system, but that only about 500 are nonviolent offenders who should be considered for deportation.

But Mr. Skolnik told members of a Senate Finance and Assembly Ways and Means budget subcommittee Friday that 152 inmates who have qualified for parole are illegal immigrants who are ready to be deported. An additional 271 illegal-immigrant inmates have been denied parole, while 303 others have not yet had parole hearings, the director said.

That adds up to 726 illegal aliens. And that count may well include only those who enter the prison system flagged with known immigration "hold" orders.

Furthermore, deportation is currently viewed by Mr. Skolnik's department as synonymous with "release." But the possibility of transferring even violent felons to prisons in their home countries should at least be explored. Even if Nevada were to pay the home countries to lock them up, the expense would almost certainly be lower. Such a proposal has been floated in Carson City in previous years and is worth revisiting.

Home countries that refuse to take their felons, meantime, could be billed for their room and board, with said bills to be collected (if necessary) by attachment of assets otherwise scheduled to be paid those governments by U.S. interests.

While Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, warned that deportation alone will not solve the state's prison overcrowding, "it would be foolish of us to not look at 726 illegal aliens and the effort that Justice Hardesty has made in getting the feds and the immigration officials to finally pay attention to this issue," she said Friday.

In any such undertaking, a prime consideration should be that violent thugs should not be merely dumped across the border in another variant of the federal government's "catch-and-release" program -- free to catch the next northbound express and return to terrorizing the citizenry at leisure.

But (with that strong caveat) committee members were on target Friday as they urged Mr. Skolnik and his department to aggressively pursue the deportation of as many of these felons as possible.