(C) South Dakota Searchlight
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Showdown over $825 million prison looms for state House of Representatives • South Dakota Searchlight [1]
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Date: 2025-02-20
PIERRE — A prison that would be the most expensive taxpayer-funded project in South Dakota history has once again failed to earn support from the lawmakers who hold the key to the last $182 million needed to build it.
The state’s budget-setting committee voted Thursday to send a bill to fund the new men’s prison to the floor of the House of Representatives with no recommendation for or against it.
Because it appropriates funds, it needs to pass that chamber by a two-thirds majority.
“This deserves to be heard, by the entire body, with an up and down vote, on the floor tomorrow,” said Rep. Mike Derby, R-Rapid City.
Thursday’s action sets up a Friday showdown between supporters and opponents of a 1,500-bed prison that Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden called a top priority this week.
No lawmaker on the Joint Appropriations Committee telegraphed their feelings on the project, but legislative leaders said at a press conference held earlier in the day that the bill’s success is not certain.
“This thing, right now, I see is floundering a bit as far as passing,” said House Speaker Pro Tempore Karla Lems, R-Canton, who is a frequent critic of the prison plan. “That could change when it gets to the floor, obviously. We don’t know what the votes will be until they get on the board.”
Rhoden, before departing to Washington, D.C., to meet with federal leaders in the Trump administration, called on lawmakers to follow through on the prison.
He lauded the Senate’s passage of a separate bill to rename the prison system as the “Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation,” and said the state needs a new prison if it expects to live up to the promise of the moniker.
“We need to put our money where our mouth is,” Rhoden said. “The unfortunate truth is, rehabilitation is not possible in the current state penitentiary. The facility is Gothic, it’s old and it’s decrepit.”
Governor’s office: Too costly to delay
The budget committee’s neutral recommendation Thursday was preceded by around an hour of back-and-forth about the prison. The price is set at $825 million before factoring in road construction or ongoing operational costs.
Supporters spoke first.
Ryan Brunner, a policy analyst in Rhoden’s office, said the $825 million guaranteed price would slip from the state’s grasp if legislators take the advice of opponents and spend a year studying alternative solutions for overcrowding at the penitentiary in Sioux Falls. The new prison on a rural site south of Sioux Falls would largely replace that older facility, state officials have said.
The guarantee of a maximum price ends March 31.
“That price will only go up if this project does not continue to move forward in some way,” Brunner said.
State Engineer Stacy Watters said lawmakers could wind up on the hook for $100 million in upgrades to “bring it up to code” if their plans involved continued use of the penitentiary, which was built in 1881.
“Three years ago, when discussing the new prison, I halted all maintenance and repair projects at the Hill that were not emergency in nature,” Watters said, referring to the penitentiary by its informal name.
There are multiple roof replacements needed across the penitentiary grounds, she said, as well as a need to address HVAC projects in the administration area, fire suppression system upgrades in recreation buildings, and heat pump replacements, upgrades to LED lighting and “repairing walls that are pulling away from the building structure” in parts of the penitentiary.
Department of Corrections Secretary Kellie Wasko, echoing Rhoden, testified that the new facility would free up space across the system to offer rehabilitation programming like substance abuse treatment and parenting classes, and to add job training.
“We need space to do this, and we can only accomplish this with a new facility,” Wasko said.
The site of a proposed men’s prison in southeastern South Dakota.
State responds to ex-warden scrutiny
Some of the comments from Brunner, Watters and Department of Corrections Secretary Wasko addressed concerns brought to lawmakers’ attention by Doug Weber, the retired chief warden and former longtime director of prisons at the state DOC.
The former warden has come out strongly and publicly against the prison plan in recent weeks. He’s sent seven letters this year to lawmakers, spoken to media outlets and addressed Republican leaders during a closed door, face-to-face meeting in Pierre.
Lems told South Dakota Searchlight on Thursday that Weber’s dispatches have offered insight to lawmakers who feel the executive branch has “not been transparent.”
Lems is among the elected officials supporting efforts to pause prison funding and study options before the state dips into the $600 million, interest-bearing incarceration construction fund it created for correctional projects three years ago.
“I’m not saying don’t do anything,” said Lems. “Overcrowding is an issue. We do have the money set aside, and that’s a good thing.”
A 2021 report from Nebraska’s DLR Group offered up a 1,500-bed multi-custody-level men’s facility as its top recommendation to address the prison system’s woes.
But Weber contends the state’s laser-like focus on that recommendation is short-sighted. The same report suggested several other options, including new facilities on the grounds of Mike Durfee State Prison in Springfield, in Rapid City, on the penitentiary grounds, and near Yankton’s Human Services Center (HSC). Such facilities would serve different kinds of inmates with different needs, which Weber said is important in a prison system with fewer than 300 maximum security inmates.
Wasko’s pleas for a single new prison – a prison bid as a Level V, or high-custody, facility – are essentially her “trying her best to make this prison, in my opinion, into something that it’s not.”
“I’m going to continue to refer to it as a 1,500-bed human warehouse, a massive human warehouse, because that’s really what it looks like to me right now,” Weber told South Dakota Searchlight.
The state has spent millions to maintain the penitentiary over the years, Weber said. It can safely serve its purpose – like prisons of similar design such as California’s San Quentin Rehabilitation Center – particularly if enough medium-security inmates could be moved out to leave one inmate per cell, according to Weber. That’s what it was designed for.
The state added more cameras, lighting and other security upgrades during Weber’s tenure, following the 2011 murder of Correctional Officer Ronald “R.J” Johnson. The campus training center was upgraded and named after Johnson a few years later.
Just a few years ago, the state installed air conditioning at the penitentiary, and put around $300,000 toward a new elevator in the penitentiary’s administration wing.
Following Thursday’s vote, Weber characterized Watters’ $100 million list of facility fixes as mostly “wish list” maintenance unrelated to the basic functioning of the penitentiary’s housing areas.
Former state Speaker of the House Steve Haugaard has also come out as a vocal opponent. On Thursday, Haugaard once again testified against the prison bill.
The state needs to focus on rehabilitation and recidivism, he said, consider all its options, and do a better job managing its penitentiary operations.
“I’ve been in the penitentiary hundreds of times over the course of my career,” said Haugaard, a Sioux Falls lawyer. “It’s perfectly suitable to get the job done if you just hire the staff that you need.”
State: New facility allows for maximum flexibility
Wasko responded by reminding the committee that lawmakers had boosted staff pay to address open positions a few years ago. The DOC is at its lowest vacancy rate in 10 years, she said, and “that is something to be commended.”
“As of the last six months, our problem has not been to recruit, it’s been to retain,” she said. “And I think we’ve got a lot of initiatives in place to improve that retention.”
Watters addressed the Yankton idea, suggesting that the state would struggle to staff a prison in that city. The HSC is the state’s psychiatric hospital.
“You’ll hear that we should construct a new prison in Yankton to be closer to HSC and medical services,” she told the committee. “However, as of right now, HSC has four of their 16 pods closed due to lack of staffing.”
Wasko and Brunner, meanwhile, maintained that the state’s plan is for a “multi-custody” facility. Its units would be flexible and able to serve the needs of any kind of inmate, they said.
“This is not the maximum security facility you’ve been told it is,” Wasko said.
According to the Department of Corrections website, a Level V facility is the most secure available. It must “have double perimeter fencing with razor wire and detection devices or equivalent security architecture.” The perimeters “must be continuously patrolled.”
In South Dakota, only the Jameson Prison Annex on the penitentiary grounds in Sioux Falls and South Dakota Women’s Prison in Pierre are Level V facilities. The 1881 penitentiary that the new prison would replace is a Level IV facility.
The request for information sent to potential bidders in 2023 asked those bidders to present a plan for “a 1,500-bed Level V facility.” A bid document for an environmental assessment uses the same language.
Lower-priced Nebraska prison a sticking point
Critics have pointed to a 1,500-bed Nebraska prison priced at $350 million as proof that South Dakota is overbuilding.
Consternation over that figure has bubbled over in multiple legislative meetings about the South Dakota prison, both before and during the 2025 session.
South Dakota officials have repeatedly responded by saying that the Nebraska prison is for medium-security inmates, and by saying the price tag is a moving target without the certainty of a guaranteed maximum price.
According to reporting from the Lincoln Journal Star, officials in that state said at an August groundbreaking that the $350 million figure should hold.
On Thursday, however, Nebraska Department of Correctional Services spokeswoman Dayne Urbanovsky told South Dakota Searchlight that the main building construction package for the new prison “will be bid out in the spring.”
“As for projected total construction costs, I do not have those numbers at this time,” she wrote.
J.E. Dunn Construction guaranteed the $825 million price for South Dakota.
Vance McMilllan of J.E. Dunn told lawmakers that the Nebraska price tag, whatever it winds up being, is for a less durable facility.
“You’ve asked us to look at a facility that is going to last 100 years,” McMillan said, adding that “I know for a fact” that some of the buildings in the Nebraska prison will be made of metal.
“Metal buildings will not last 100 years,” he said.
When asked on Wednesday if the South Dakota prison price would be lower if the state had asked for a lower-custody facility, Brunner said he’d have to “look at all the classification levels” to know for sure.
He said South Dakota’s design will accommodate mostly medium-security inmates, but that the new prison’s design makes it like a five-speed pickup, for which you can use “all five speeds.”
“A modern cell is concrete wall, concrete floor, steel door, two people per cell,” Brunner said. “And so that’s the facility that’s been designed.”
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