When it comes to the criminal legal system, South Dakota has a “lock ’em up and throw away the key” mentality.
Instead of strengthening and expanding mental health and substance abuse treatment programs and tackling failing systems like education, housing and unemployment, for too long politicians have pushed tough-on-crime policies that have led us to a mass incarceration crisis – and our prisons are bursting at the seams.
In fact, South Dakota will need a third more prison space than it has now by 2036, according to a report from Arrington Watkins, a consultant firm hired by the state. The report details that roughly half of the increased prison population can be directly attributed to Senate Bill 146, legislation passed by the South Dakota state legislature in 2023.
Heralded as “what I hope will be a landmark law and order bill for our state” by the bill’s prime sponsor, former Sen. Brent Hoffman, this law requires people convicted of violent offenses to serve between 85% and 100% of their sentences, depending on the category of their crime. This change removes the discretion of trial judges. and, more concerningly, the parole board. Through the length of a sentence, there is a lot of time in which people can be helped to change and improve, then assessed to see whether they have progressed to a point where they can safely participate in society.
Inmates serving long sentences for South Dakota’s harshest laws aren’t evaluated on the merits of their rehabilitation and behavior to determine when they’re ready to re-enter society; instead, they serve their sentences and are released back to us without a supervisory program to support a positive re-entry. Restricting inmates’ ability to earn time off their sentence through positive behavior and programs only teaches these individuals – especially those who enter as children or young adults – that the criminal legal system believes them to be beyond reform.
South Dakota has some of the highest statutory maximums for violent crimes, higher than federal statutory maximums. Many of these crimes are committed within the context of substance abuse issues. But prisons aren’t built as rehabilitation facilities; for many, parole serves as an important vehicle for supervised re-entry and reconciliation with their communities.
Eliminating early parole affects more than the person serving a prison sentence. Children of incarcerated parents often experience grief, anxiety, confusion and trauma, and these feelings only intensify the longer the parent is away. Longer sentences mean a prolonged financial burden, sometimes pushing families into poverty. When time served in prison is long, families often change – children grow up, relationships shift and economic circumstances evolve. The longer the sentence, the harder it can be for families to reunite and rebuild after release.
This one-size-fits-all solution to a very complex issue has already increased costs to the state’s prison system and demonstrates a concerning disregard for real-people’s lives.
We all want to live in safe and healthy communities, and our criminal justice policies should be focused on the most effective approaches to achieving that goal.
We need to dramatically reduce our reliance on incarceration and invest instead in alternatives to prison, including approaches better designed to break the cycle of crime and recidivism by helping people rebuild their lives. We need a forward-looking reform agenda that will prioritize people and not prisons, enhance safety and help people live law-abiding lives.
South Dakota has the opportunity to shift away from tough-on-crime policies that have led to more arrests and increased costs and embrace a smart justice vision of our criminal legal system – one that solves the problems of crime rather than simply locking people up. But real criminal legal reform will require leadership and commitment from our legislators, police, district attorneys, judges, and people in each part of the system. We need visionary leaders who won’t rely on the way things have always been done and instead have a smart, innovative plan for how to move us forward.
The discussion about the new prison in South Dakota shouldn’t end with where it gets built. Instead, we need to be asking how to eliminate the need for bigger prisons in the first place.
A version of this column also appeared in The Dakota Scout.
