After years of political sparring, over $20 million dollars in sunk costs to the taxpayers, and faction politics, South Dakota at last has a prison plan finalized.
In what Gov. Larry Rhoden describes as the largest single public safety investment in state history, lawmakers answered the prison question in a special session Tuesday, approving a 1,500-bed, $650 million proposal for a new prison in Sioux Falls.
The new facility replaces the territorial-era prison in Sioux Falls, which has been in use since 1881.
Sioux Falls Republican Sen. Steve Kolbeck sat on the prison task force over the summer. He said he’s happy with final bill.
“It’s been a long journey, and it’s taken a long time. A lot of people think it was done in the dark of night — it wasn’t. We’ve actually been putting money away for years," Kolbeck said. "I think we have a very good product. I know the sticker shock is a lot. If we want to be where we want, and if we want people not to come back (to prison), then we have to spend some money.”
However, Piedmont Sen. John Carley was a no in the end. He says the cash on hand question is too troubling to ignore.
“Quote, we have the cash on hand. We don’t," Carley said. "They get to that by saying oh, we’re going to get some interest in the future years we hope, and oh yeah, we want to swipe another $79 million in taxpayer money we’re holding onto and move it over into that. It doesn’t exist, this $650 million. It’s $505 million.”
Indeed, on the prison plan website speculative interest and general fund transfers are included as part of the budget.
The day’s drama peaked in the Senate where the bill passed on a precise two-thirds margin, the minimum needed to clear. That means Democratic votes were key. Senate minority leader Jamie Smith said his support goes beyond a single facility.
“What are we going to do to keep people out of prison? What are we going to do for mental health and drug treatment? All those different things. We can’t stop remembering those are things we need to address. It’s quite clear also we’ll need funding to do it,” Smith said.
Another key difference between supporters and opponents was a philosophical debate over rehabilitation in South Dakota. Some legislators likened building a new prison to a well-known question: “Which came first the chicken or the egg?”
On one side, legislators said the state needed the new building to have space for programming and address rehabilitative services within the Department of Corrections.
Senate President Pro Tempore Chris Karr voted yes on the project. He said there’s no chicken and egg when you’re operating well above capacity across the prison system.
“We're over-occupancy at our current facilities, no matter what. We're over-occupancy at the hill. We're over-occupancy at Durfee and Springfield. Those individuals need to go somewhere other than just living on top of each other," Karr said. “So, to me, it's really basic. We need to address the overcrowding. The Hill, the territorial prison, as was mentioned, 140-plus years old. It's done. We've leveraged it as long as we could. It needs to be replaced."
On the flip side of the debate, some legislators said this decision put the cart before the horse: the DOC isn’t rehabilitating offenders now and a new facility isn’t going to change that.
Sen. Kevin Jensen spent six years on the Corrections Commission and voted no on the project. He said he believes the state used to rehabilitate offenders, but then something changed.
“I saw when we had programming. I saw when Secretary Wasko came in, she eliminated almost all of it. We have no addiction counseling going on. We have no mental health counseling. We have no reentry counseling for almost three years,” Jensen said. “People that are leaving, the prison now have not been in a classroom. So you got to ask why. Rehabilitation, addiction counseling, mental health, reentry programming has always been part of our system. But for the last three years, it was totally ignored.”
Wasko announced her resignation earlier this month.
As the state moves forward with a new 1,500-bed facility, there’s still four years until construction is expected to finish. Legislators on both sides say now is the time to act if something is going to change.
