Two years after approving a tough-on-crime sentencing law, South Dakota is scrambling to deal with the price tag for that legislation: Housing thousands of additional inmates could require up to $2 billion to build new prisons in the next decade.
That’s a lot of money for a state with one of the lowest populations in the U.S., but a consultant said it’s needed to keep pace with an anticipated 34% surge of new inmates in the next decade as a result of South Dakota’s tough criminal justice laws. And while officials are grumbling about the cost, they don’t seem concerned with the laws that are driving the need even as national crime rates are dropping.
“Crime has been falling everywhere in the country, with historic drops in crime in the last year or two,” said Bob Libal, senior campaign strategist at the criminal justice nonprofit The Sentencing Project. “It’s a particularly unusual time to be investing $2 billion in prisons.”
Some Democratic-led states have worked to close prisons and enact changes to lower inmate populations, but that’s a tough sell in Republican-majority states such as South Dakota that believe in a tough-on-crime approach, even if that leads to more inmates.
For now, state lawmakers have set aside a $600 million fund to replace the overcrowded 144-year-old South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls, making it one of the most expensive taxpayer-funded projects in South Dakota history.
But South Dakota will likely need more prisons. Phoenix-based Arrington Watkins Architects, which the state hired as a consultant, has said South Dakota will need 3,300 additional beds in coming years, bringing the cost to $2 billion.
Driving up costs is the need for facilities with different security levels to accommodate the inmate population.
Concerns about South Dakota’s prisons first arose four years ago, when the state was flush with COVID-19 relief funds. Lawmakers wanted to replace the penitentiary, but they couldn’t agree on where to put the prison and how big it should be.
A task force of state lawmakers assembled by Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden is expected to decide that in a plan for prison facilities this July. Many lawmakers have questioned the proposed cost, but few have called for criminal justice changes that would make such a large prison unnecessary.
“One thing I’m trying to do as the chairman of this task force is keep us very focused on our mission,” said Lieutenant Gov. Tony Venhuizen. “There are people who want to talk about policies in the prisons or the administration or the criminal justice system more broadly, and that would be a much larger project than the fairly narrow scope that we have.”
You can read the full article at ABC News.