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Prison work group peppered with public testimony in first Sioux Falls meeting • South Dakota Searchlight [1]
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Date: 2025-04-03
SIOUX FALLS — Twenty people lined up Thursday at the Military Heritage Alliance to share their thoughts on South Dakota’s correctional needs with the group of lawmakers and other assorted officials tasked with finding ways to address prison overcrowding.
There was talk of offender re-entry, rehabilitation and second chances. The state penitentiary in Sioux Falls was called unsafe and inadequate, but also endorsed as a building with life left in it. There were calls for a work release center in Vermillion and a small, new men’s prison in Rapid City.
One prominent idea, however, drew no public support: the $825 million men’s prison the state Department of Corrections spent $50 million last year preparing to build before lawmakers shut it down.
The public testimony came at the end of the first meeting for the Project Prison Reset work group. Gov. Larry Rhoden created the group in response to the legislative defeat of the 1,500-bed Lincoln County prison project, asking its members to determine what, if anything, should be built to ease the burden on the state’s correctional facilities.
During the first half of the all-day Thursday affair, Corrections Secretary Kellie Wasko repeated statistics she’s rattled off over the past three years. The state penitentiary in Sioux Falls has twice the inmates it’s designed for. Other facilities, such as the Rapid City minimum custody center, have as many as triple the inmates they ought to.
Mike Durfee State Prison in Springfield, a former college campus, is home to more than a thousand inmates. That population, Wasko told the work group, shouldn’t rise above the hundreds.
It’s the state penitentiary and its once-hoped-for Lincoln County replacement, however, that served as both the catalyst for the work group’s creation and the flurry of public commentary its members faced Thursday.
Safety, location concerns
A parolee who’d been ducking supervision shot a police officer on Tuesday afternoon in central Sioux Falls, Mayor Paul TenHaken noted in his testimony. He suggested the state prison system releases inmates it shouldn’t because “there’s no room at the inn.”
Without a new prison, TenHaken said, “I’m afraid we’re going to continue to see the kind of thing we saw this week.”
TenHaken has said in the past that he’d rather not have a prison in Sioux Falls city limits, but said Thursday he hadn’t come to the meeting to stake out a position on the site.
Joel Arends did, though. Arends represents southern Sioux Falls on the Lincoln County Commission. He called the proposition of a prison on land that would otherwise become high-value homes “a buzzkill” for his county, one of the fastest-growing in the state.
“The prison site is designed for rural housing, not commercial, industrial uses,” Arends said.
Another Lincoln County commissioner, Douglas Putnam, argued that the penitentiary has never been well-placed in Sioux Falls. It was built prior to statehood, and Putnam said the logic behind placing the Capitol in the middle of the state ought to apply as its leaders now ponder a replacement for the 1881 facility in South Dakota’s southeast corner.
“This needs to be in the middle of the state, to serve everybody,” Putnam said.
Some call rehabilitation, second chances key to reform
Karen Schwebach, a 30-year prison volunteer, zeroed in on the potential of mercy to lessen the state’s correctional workload. There are numerous inmates with life sentences who have long since changed their ways, she said, and clemency actions for those with records of self-improvement ought to be part of any conversation on how to address the prison population.
“South Dakota can still be tough on crime, but we can strike a balance by giving another chance to the men that really have changed their lives,” Schwebach said.
Bob Schatz, a former inmate who left the prison system in 2014, also focused on issues outside of building needs. He had several ideas for reducing the number of inmates who fail upon release and wind up back in the system.
Perhaps the simplest, Schatz suggested, would be to expand the state’s drug court program to include parolees. Currently, all the drug court participants who get 18 months of intensive supervision and support for sobriety are probationers, working their way through the program to avoid a prison sentence.
Opening up such a program for parolees would help set more of them up for long-term success, he said.
“Six in 10 people complete that program,” Schatz said.
Pam Pakieser of Sioux Falls also spoke of her time in the state’s prison system, several decades ago at this point, and what’s helped her stay out. It wasn’t a parole officer or re-entry program, she said, but the kindness of volunteers and others willing to support her along the way.
Today, she tries to help others on the inside and their families. A loved one is currently imprisoned at the state penitentiary, she said, and fears for his safety in the face of repeated bouts of violence and the ensuing lockdowns.
A new building might be necessary, she said, but finding out the why behind the deteriorating security situation in the buildings the DOC should be just as serious a focus.
“We can put whatever we want on a pretty chart,” Pakieser said. “I would like people, mostly you people, to talk to the ones in the trenches to see what’s really going on.”
Sam Lint, a man serving a life sentence for first-degree murder, spoke into the microphone through the speaker of his mother’s phone.
Lint spent 14 years in the Jameson Annex of the Sioux Falls correctional campus unit before transferring to “the Hill,” the informal name for the 1881 penitentiary. The state “needs a new prison,” Lint said, but it also needs to find a way to better serve its inmates and protect correctional staff.
In the past three years, he said, life behind the walls has gotten more difficult, particularly for the majority of inmates who, unlike him, will be released into their communities eventually.
“What we have here are buildings full of classrooms that sit empty most of the time,” Lint said.
Defense lawyer, former warden: Consider more than one location
Ryan Kolbeck, a Sioux Falls defense lawyer, asked the work group to look beyond one Sioux Falls-area prison as a solution.
His clients often struggle with addiction, Kolbeck said, and they have better chances in his city because there’s a better chance they’ll get a slot in treatment.
He said the state ought to find ways to expand probation supervision and addiction treatment in rural areas so defendants there have as many chances to sidestep a prison sentence as those in Sioux Falls do.
Ideally, Kolbeck said, a judge is able to deal with a defendant the way a parent deals with a child who spills milk: by giving them a chance to correct the problem.
“When the kid cleans up the milk, there’s nothing for the parent to do,” Kolbeck said.
Kolbeck suggested smaller work release centers around the state, in addition to any higher-security facility. He pointed to Vermillion, where voters just approved a new jail and students at the University of South Dakota might partner with the Department of Corrections to help boost the number of inmates earning their high school diploma behind bars.
Earlier in the day, Corrections Secretary Kellie Wasko ran through slides showing how many of the 3,900 or so inmates in the state system had earned high school equivalency diplomas in the previous year.
Between male and female inmates, the number was 135. Just one was female, Wasko said, owing to the loss of an instructor for the program last year.
Kolbeck reacted strongly to those statistics.
“That’s embarrassing,” he said.
Darin Young was warden at the penitentiary until 2021. That year, he and a handful of other DOC employees were removed by the administration of then-Gov. Kristi Noem under allegations of nepotism and harassment that were never fully publicly explained and never resulted in criminal charges. Since then, four people have cycled through as Sioux Falls warden. Former Warden Teresa Bittinger resigned last fall, shortly after a weekslong lockdown that saw the complex’s sweat lodges dismantled in a search for contraband.
The current warden, serving in an interim role, is Amber Pirraglia, who had been working as director of prisons until Bittinger’s departure.
On Thursday, Young told the prison reset group that the penitentiary could still safely house inmates if the state were to think beyond a single replacement for it. The DOC could build a floor onto the Jameson Annex, he suggested in a letter to the group. It could also put a new building on 28 acres of land it owns to the north of the penitentiary, build a smaller medium-security unit on state land near the Human Services Center in Yankton and take a handful of other steps to upgrade facilities across the system.
In his spoken testimony, Young reminded the group that lawmakers have set aside nearly $600 million for prisons in recent years. If the state’s going to spend that kind of money, Young said Thursday, “it has to be a home run.”
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