South Dakota State Senator Kevin Jensen (District 16) joins Dave Roetman for the second part of a series on the proposed new state prison ahead of a special legislative session. Jensen, who co-chairs the Initial Incarceration Reentry Committee with Representative Jamison, says South Dakota’s recidivism rate has held around 40 to 44 percent, with 28 percent tied to technical parole violations, and argues that fixing recidivism could have freed hundreds of beds. He questions shifting bed counts for a Sioux Falls site, says the $650 million figure is a target rather than a cap, and doubts it has two-thirds support. He compares Nebraska’s 1,512-bed prison bid at $313 million, discusses steel cells versus precast concrete, and criticizes work release changes that left most qualified inmates idle. He also cites Texas’s caseworker approach and the Second Look movement on sentencing.
Topics: new state prison, prison task force, special session, recidivism, parole violations, work release, Sioux Falls prison site, $650 million prison cost, steel cells, Nebraska prison, sentencing reform
“The $650 million is not a cap, that’s a target.” - Kevin Jensen, on the new
$650M deal reached that keeps South Dakota men's prison in Sioux Falls
Prison task force agrees to $650M in Sioux Falls
It's Time to Act on South Dakota's New State Penitentiary by lt Governor Tony Venhuizen
This is part 2 of a 3 part series. the upcoming Part 3 will be about the Juvenile justice and reforming the system
Full transcript
About this transcript: It was machine-transcribed in-house and then edited for readability. Filler words and false starts are removed, and the meaning is unchanged. [?] marks a word or phrase we’re unsure of. Timestamps are approximate.
[00:00]
Dave Roetman: This is the Making Waves podcast, my name is Dave Roetman. We’re here with Kevin Jensen, Senator Kevin Jensen, District 16, and we’re going to talk a little bit about a few issues, one of which is the second part of our series about what’s happening with the upcoming prison. There’s a special session coming up pretty soon. Kevin, could you tell us where we’re at with the prison funding, where the potential prison is going to be, and what’s the latest?
Kevin Jensen: It’s kind of an interesting point in time here. Because I’m with Representative Jamison, we are co-chairing a committee, it’s a mouthful, it’s the Initial Incarceration Reentry Committee, there’s a lot to the committee name it. What we are doing in that committee should have been done before we even started thinking about a new prison. Because what we’re finding is that our recidivism in South Dakota is measured by a calculation that we started using in South Dakota in 2020, or in 2006, excuse me.
But what we’re finding is every state has their own formula. For recidivism so when we compare ourselves to other states it’s again it’s not apples to apples or even apples to oranges it’s apples to jackalopes I mean it’s apples to something we can’t even really put our hands on but in South Dakota the one thing I can say is our recidivism rate has been the same virtually 40 to 43 or 44 percent.
For at least 20 years going back there was a when Tim Reisch, Representative Reisch was secretary, I know there was a huge emphasis put on programming. And I’ve talked to some of the state evaluators that evaluate these things. And they said during that period, we actually, some progress. But since then, again, it’s pumped right back up into the over 40%. It’s always the same thing. 25% of those, of that 40%, or 28%, excuse me, 28% is technical parole violations.
Only 15% of those released in a three year period recidivate because of a new crime. Only 15% are coming back because of another crime. The rest of them are parole violations, which could be anything from somebody driving with a suspended license on their own parole, of course. Parole officers have a lot of discretion. Each work with their people and find they can once they eventually they give up and they say you got to go back because you have too many violations they can get a verbal warning written warning and a few other things but they have some discretion again 28 are just because they’re violating their parole I also find it interesting and I really dug into the details in this because I just spotted it about a week ago digging into things.
We have a new department within corrections called the AAU. I think it’s the absconder unit. So when they started this unit, A year ago, we had 150 absconders. Absconders are basically just people that are on parole, but they can’t find them. They’re just gone. They’re off the radar. They leave the state. They’re somewhere, move to a part of the state where they can’t find them. But even after people in this absconder unit for a year, I think our absconder rate as of this last month was 150.
So we went from 152 to 150. I’m guessing that’s probably costing us a half million dollars for this unit. And I’m not saying they’re doing a bad job. I’m just saying, I’m digging into finding out why the rate hasn’t gone down and why we can’t find these people. The parole violations can vary, like I say, everything from driving without a driver’s license to not checking in with parole. Officer often enough. If they don’t check in enough they can be re-violated and sent back.
So I think there’s something to work with there that we can try and figure out, put some more standards to that. Not all the people who went to prison are bad criminals. You know a lot of people just made bad choices. We started looking at you know recidivism to me should have been looked at a long time ago because we’ve kind of come up with this number and it’s a rough number.
If we could get that recidivism rate down into low 20% by taking most of those technical violations off the table We could have opened up over the last three years somewhere between four and six hundred beds That’s a lot. That’s a lot. That’s almost the entire Hill so These kind of efforts should have been done before we decided we just needed to build. I just started calling up, the big beautiful prison.
Now the big beautiful bill has passed. So it’s a big beautiful prison.
[05:00]
And, we’ve gone anywhere from, we needed 1512 beds to where we need Then they reduced it down to 800 to kind of fit the footprint of a piece of property. That property is taken off the table. Now we’ve got two areas in Sioux Falls. Probably most likely they’re going to look the most seriously at the Sweetman site. But I believe they were saying that most beds we could probably get on that site was 1,200 if we build the prison and the design that they want.
So then this last week, I guess this week on Monday, from the session that was held in Sioux Falls, I hear law enforcement and others saying that we’re going to double the number. I mean, this was a quote, I think, or close to it, paraphrased, we’ll be doubling the number of inmates in a Sioux Falls prison system. And yeah, I scratched my head because okay, if say we build a 800 bed unit and we decommission the Hill, we’ve added We take them off the Hill and we put them in a new location.
That’s no growth whatsoever in Sioux Falls. If we go to 1200, at best we’re growing at 50%. So when they say the state’s going to have to kick in because we’re going to cut double the number of inmates, we’re going to have double the number of people coming out of prison and landing in Sioux Falls and all this crime is going to rise. Well, there’s a couple assumptions there. One is we’re not going to fix anything with recidivism, so our count is going to go up.
The other one is you’re assuming that everybody that gets out of prison is a criminal. I mean, in the... Terms that they’re gonna commit a crime, which we know isn’t true. It’s only 15%, on average, every year. Some of the rhetoric that is being put out there to make it look like the situation, it’s a dire situation for Sioux Falls. Again, if we only go with 800 bed unit. It doesn’t fix the problem that they’ve been claiming from the beginning, that we are overcrowded.
But it does give them the room to open up the Hill. And I saw recently where corrections, put it this way, three months ago they were saying that Hill was gonna come down. And it was probably gonna cost 20 to 30 million to tear it down and get rid of it. Well, a few weeks ago the secretary came out and said it’s a big beautiful historical building and we could use it for tactical training for law enforcement or make a museum out of it.
Excuse me, if it’s falling down how many millions would we put in? If it’s that bad then nobody can be in there? How much is it going to cost to fix it up so that we could keep it up and keep it going?
Dave Roetman: It seems that there’s a lot of speaking out of both sides of their mouths in this whole process.
Kevin Jensen: It is really frustrating because I don’t think we ever get sit down and get right to the point. Exactly what is this prison going to do? It’s not going to just create enough empty beds and I don’t want anybody to misunderstand we have a crowding problem and as they evaluate inmates they have to put them in the appropriate level of housing.
Dave Roetman: From a level five down to work release or whatever. Right, so that would be maximum security, minimum security, that kind of stuff.
Kevin Jensen: Yeah, exactly. And depending on how dangerous they are. And I think the number is, we release about a thousand inmates a year and a thousand come in. So that’s where the numbers kind of stand. But we have a lot of people leaving. So as those new ones come in, They have to go through intake, be evaluated to figure out what security level to house them in. So they do need, we do need beds.
To be able to shuffle people around. So I talked to one young man that was in the, he just was released, but he was in that intake center, I think he said for the full 90 days. And I think that’s all the longer there should keep them in there. And I don’t know if that was because they didn’t have the beds or... He only had a one year sentence, he served nine months of that sentence.
So he’s one of those guys that he was on work release, he’s got a great job, he loves his job, and he’s not gonna go back. He was just a guy that made a mistake. So I don’t think we’re, there has to be. More reasoning behind needing this big prison. I understand that having more in one location might be easier to manage to a certain degree, but adding a fifth location also means that we’re going to duplicate everything that we have at the other four.
We’re going to have a whole new food service, mechanical, you name it, maintenance, everything is going to be now a fifth location because they have said they’re not shutting down Springfield, Jameson, Rapid, or Yankton. Yankton, primarily where the federal prison’s down there, prisoners down there, but build at Yankton as well and you know I’ve been saying this for a long time if we had a 300 beds at each location we’d have our 1,200 beds get a recidivism rate down even into the 30s we could free up a couple hundred more beds and I think you know a comment was made that well if you build a new building at each location you got to add all of those services there too.
[10:00]
But no, we already have food service, we already have mechanical, we already have maintenance. You probably just need a few extra staff at each place. And it’s easier to hire a few at four locations than two or three, four hundred more at a new location.
Dave Roetman: Sioux Falls has a low unemployment. Great. It’s not going to be so much more people here.
Kevin Jensen: Yeah. The other thing that’s kind of come to light too is our work release. We have, and I think the secretary will tell you this too, that a lot of our work release people were getting paid 25 cents a dollar an hour. To work, but they were working at places like LifeScape. They were working at nonprofits, getting paid a little bit for their commissary money and that kind of stuff. But they were able to get out in public, work, interact with the public, and maybe be looking for a better job while they were out there.
But when the secretary came, We raised it to a minimum wage, which I think one source said $10 an hour. Well, that pretty much takes all your non-profits out. So we got 230 people sitting at the minimum center right now that are qualified for a work release. It varies between six and nine people that are actually working. One of our representatives checked at the Rapid City Unit and got confirmation that we have 345 in Rapid City that are qualified for work release.
There’s only one working. That’s a lot of bored people. That’s a lot of people sitting in their cells 23 hours a day with nothing to do but watch TV, play games, cause trouble, get into a higher level of security need because the quickest way to make people upset is to keep them is to keep them held down. Actually, I get a letter like this almost every week. I’d like to read just a little bit of this.
Please. And this is from an inmate. I won’t give names, but this is a letter I just received. As you are aware, the prison system is severely overcrowded. Even heard that South Dakota incarcerates more people per capita than any other state. Yeah, I don’t know if that’s true, but there are Constant problems with bedbugs, short staff, no recreation periods, extremely high commissary pricing and poor food conditions, as well as other problems, medical needs and programming needs that are not being addressed.
That says, if you treat people poorly, you’re not going to get a response from them. I think the other letter said if you treat people like animals, oh I know what that’s, I’m sorry, that was from the court case of the two guys that beat up the officer Harms. So I got this quote If you remember, Officer Harms, a while back, maybe two years ago or so, was beaten almost to the point of death and spent months in the hospital, has recovered.
But this is a... Lester Monroe was one of those that did the beating and I don’t know if they’ve been sentenced yet or not. They were both found guilty. But the quote here is, this had nothing to do with harms and had everything to do with the DOC. If the DOC didn’t treat them like animals, they wouldn’t act like it. But until they stopped treating them like animals, they will continue to act like animals.
And continue their attacks on corrections officers. That’s, I think, a direct quote from the transcript. I’m trying to get the transcript of the trial right now. But if it’s paraphrased, it’s very, very close to the actual. When you have people sitting around 23 hours a day, especially gang members with nothing to do, they’re going to cause trouble. I mean, especially for those that are in there. They may be 35 years old and they got a 30-year sentence.
Idle hands. Yeah, idle hands. There’s so many things that we should be looking at and we need to be looking at before we even look to see if we need a new prison. I think there’s going to be some interesting fallout over the weekend or next week over some comments that were made in an Argus Leader article today. I won’t quote any of that. I don’t have that, but there’ll be some interesting conversations following that too.
But if we could figure out a way to build 1,200 beds, the price is gonna go way up. We they set a cap at 650.
[15:00]
I want a back statement. What I found out on Monday at another meeting was the 650 million dollars is not a cap. That’s a target. That recommendation just said that we’re willing to spend 650 million But that didn’t include land acquisition. I mean, well, you could kind of argue both ways on that. Some people say it did, some people didn’t. But there’s pretty strong feeling now that that’s not a cap. If we want to get 1200 and they come back at 700 million.
Of course, the task force is done and over, so they’re going to have to put that number in front of the legislature. Going from 600 to 650 million, I honestly believe that you might squeak out the votes in one house two-thirds, but you’re not going to get it in both houses. The administration just has to realize they just don’t have the votes now I’m guessing they pushed it all the way out to september to try and do some convincing political convincing you know how that works but most of the people I know that are going to say no are going to say no no matter what because they don’t believe We need what they’re asking for.
Dave Roetman: So nothing is written in stone with this upcoming special session? I believe it’s going to be a long day.
Kevin Jensen: It’s going to be a long day. There’ll be a ton of amendments. If it was me, we’ve already lost construction season. If it was me, I probably would just wait till the regular session, go through the whole thing again. By then, the CMR, the construction manager at risk, could possibly have blueprints. We’ll be voting on something we don’t even know what it is. We will not have blueprints. We won’t have all the bids then.
You can’t rebid everything from toilets to electrical to fences in two months and expect to have anything even close to a bid. Unless you say, give us an ungodly number, you know it won’t cost that much, but give us a number that we can shoot under. But then if they do that, there’s no way you’re going to hit $650 million. You’re going to be way over the mark again. And I keep going back to, and I have another phone call out right now, Hausmann [?] Construction in Nebraska.
1512 bed, multi-custody unit for $313 million was the bed. And we’re talking 1,200 beds now for $650 million. It’s kind of interesting, I had called the construction company. On Tuesday and they returned my call and I said, tell me. I said, the only thing I want to know, are you using steel cells or using precast cement? And he says, well, I’ll get back to you in a little bit. He comes back with, well, we have a non-disclosure agreement that we signed that we can’t tell you.
He says, but he gave me the name of the guy at the state. And if they can’t even tell us that, then you really got to wonder what’s going on because, no, we don’t want the blueprints. That’s security level stuff we don’t need to know. But why can’t we find out? What kind of cell they’re building because the steel cells.
Dave Roetman: It should be obvious what’s in there. I know. Let’s say you’re a prisoner down in Nebraska. Oh, yeah, it’s steel.
Kevin Jensen: Yeah, and they keep saying, well, steel cells, only a 50-year prison. I don’t buy that. I don’t believe it. My house is 112 years old, built out of two-by-fours and two-by-sixes. I’ll admit, they’re full-dimension lumber, right? My house is in better shape than when it was built. If you maintain it, A little bit of WD-40 goes a long way.
Dave Roetman: That’s exactly the argument I’ve been making with people. You can’t compare these two plans because one of them is not built to a hundred year prison. It’s like nobody built something for a hundred years.
Kevin Jensen: Well, if you give me a slab of cement and a chunk of steel, I think I can get through the cement faster than I can get through the cement [?].
Dave Roetman: It’ll all be built to specifications, to code. And if it’s built to code, you can maintain it.
Kevin Jensen: What we did here, I think it was at the at a recent one of the task force meetings in Pierre and I know it was held in the appropriations room which was a small room so you had to stand out in the hallway but you know we kind of put a little bit of pressure on JE Dunn for the price tag but he said in that meeting The reason the price is so high is because we were following the specific recommendations from DOC.
Yeah, we can build it cheaper, but if we’re going to build exactly your specifications, we can’t build it cheaper.
Dave Roetman: That’s fair to say, especially because the original plan was a 1,500 unit maximum security prison. Right. Which is absurdly more than needed.
Kevin Jensen: And basically it was all the bids and everything came in based on kind of the drawings and blueprints, the floor plans and everything. But those were very specific. It wasn’t like Nebraska did.
[20:00]
Nebraska went out and said At the time, they said, we have $366 million. What can we get for it? We need 1,512 [?] beds. So they get a number of bids. They took the lowest bid of 313. That’s not what South Dakota did. South Dakota said, this is the floor plan. This is basically, this is exactly what we want for this number of acres. How much is it going to cost? Well, when I go buy a used car, I don’t go in and say, hey, I got $5,000 to buy a used car.
What can I get? I go in there and say, Well I guess that’s the way, I’m not going to tell him up front what I’m willing to spend. Right. I’m just going to say, I want this kind of car, this kind of mileage, that kind of stuff, what do you got? I want some leverage, I want some negotiating points, and we kind of gave all that away. That’s actually how it got up to two billion dollars because I know there’s a little bit of Supply issues, and I know there’s some Inflation going on but inflation right now is we’re at the mid to upper twos inflation I just don’t buy this 10% increase every year and even if you throw the tariffs in there And when we’ve got a company right here in South Dakota up in Huron building steel cells for...
The elevators [?] group and they’ve built prisons all over the country all over the world they built prisons at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba they built prisons for florida and other places you know you can’t tell me that using a steel cell from here on down in Cuba is any less of a risk of falling apart. I mean, if it’s going to fall apart in a humid community, it’s going to be down in Cuba.
Plus shipping costs are going to be low.
Dave Roetman: And then shipping costs and all that.
Kevin Jensen: An elevators [?] group came in and said, I don’t want to beat a dead horse on this one, but they said they could build exactly that same prison for $535 million. And yeah it would be designed just a little different but still perform all the same functions that we needed you know the other thing that you know there’s kind of a That’s not really a final note because there’s still a lot going on.
One of the things that Texas did to reduce the recidivism rate from like 38% down into the 20s was every inmate has something to do. Every inmate. They’re washing windows, they’re cleaning toilets, they have work release, they actually have staff within the prison system that helps them find a job and monitors them and their parolee to officer ratio is a lot lower than ours. Ours right now for every Inmate released there’s 57 of them to one parole officer.
You know they’re supposed to keep track of them every week or so Week to ten days depending on their release Documents that seems like a lot, but that’s a lot So what Texas did is they reduced the number of? Parolees per officer but then they also have a staff of I guess better for a lack of better word caseworkers that help these people find the jobs keep the jobs they’re kind of a secondary backup or a mentor so for every person we could keep out of prison we save $35,000 a year so If we’ve got a caseworker that keeps three people from coming back...
It pays their salary. Yeah, it pays their salary in a lot more. We’re talking about $105,000 saved. That’s probably two times our salary anyway. So I think we kind of put our focus always on the inside rather than the outside. We don’t want them to come back. We want them rehabilitated. I know there’s a lot of, there’s some hard-feeling people out there that say, my gosh, they did the crime, they’re going to do the time.
Well, that’s fine. But if you’ve ever seen a picture of a dog chained to a doghouse in the middle of the winter sitting outside. Is that a nice way to take care of a dog? Well, that’s cruel. But when we have prisoners that have maybe a monetary crime, they didn’t hurt anybody, but... Maybe check kiting or something like that. But to keep them in their cells 23 hours a day and not allow them to go out and get a job or anything.
To me it’s just, I mean we are, the system is failing. And you could go back and say, well it wasn’t. There’s a lot of people will tell you now it’s, there’s a lot of people will tell you now it’s worse than it was three years ago. But even leading up to three years ago, we’ve always had more of this focus on incarceration. When they’re released, they’re done. One of the things I’ve been digging into, there’s a national movement, it’s called the Second Look Movement.
In South Dakota, if somebody’s serving a sentence, After the end of year two, they cannot have their sentence reviewed. They can only be reviewed in the first year or the second year, depending on the type of crime. But what a lot of states are doing, there’s a term called rogue [?] sentencing.
[25:00]
We have pretty strict sentencing guidelines for what level of a felony and how much time they... What the judge has to pick from for kind of a flow chart that if they did this then we have this range of years that they can be sentenced for. Sometimes when you add habitual or something to it... Then that kind of throws that out the window. So sometimes we get people with a financial crime.
There’s one gentleman I’ve been kind of talking to and his attorney. He had a financial crime of a supposedly took $150,000 out of his own partnership with his partners. And a judge sentenced him, I won’t say he’s the greatest guy in the world, he lived in Texas and he had some check-kiting issues down there. But when he come up here and he formed his partnership and supposedly took the $150,000. The judge gave him a 65-year sentence.
He has served 20 years, and from what I can find, he has never been written up once. Last year, the parole board voted unanimously to commute his sentence. Only the governor can commute. But the recommendation was to commute his sentence. He’s already served 20 years, he’s a model prisoner. Has 45 years left. Governor Noem and Secretary Ross [?], Governor Noem said no, denied it. And there’s a letter from DOC said that it’s denied and will not be reconsidered.
I’ve got a copy of that letter and I gotta ask why. Why do we have people that could possibly be rehabilitated? They didn’t hurt anybody. It was a nonviolent crime. They got an excessive sentence in a lot of people’s opinion. And why aren’t we looking at how many people could we look at in that same situation? This letter that I was just reading from before is similar. Now this guy, he admits He served, I think, 15 years of his sentence already.
Pretty much a model prisoner. Knows he was stupid, knows he was a mistake. And a lot of times when people make these mistakes, there’s drugs and alcohol involved. He also was one of these that the parole board voted to have his sentence commuted, and it was denied. And without reason. I mean, I think if we’re going to deny somebody’s commutation, there should be at least a reason to give them back to the parole, to the inmate, as to why it was reduced.
So again, the Second Chance Movement, what it does is it looks at all 50 states. Some states are allowing a judge to take a second look at the sentencing to make sure it was appropriate with the crime. And of course the inmates could petition to have that happen. So that’s just another little tool I’m looking at.
Dave Roetman: That seems very reasonable, I believe, in redemption. And especially if you can look at somebody that’s likely not to recommit a crime. Right. We should be giving them grace.
Kevin Jensen: So that’s why I kind of bring this whole back to we should have been doing this before we started trying to build a new prison. I still believe that we can remodel We can change some things. We can add a few buildings here and there, add 800 to 1,200 beds at a much, much lower cost, probably half as much. Incremental. And do it as needed. Yeah. We build 1,500 beds in four years.
We’re not going to need 1,500 beds in four years. That’s a 10-year projection. That assumes in 10 years that we do nothing to look at how people are sentenced, to do nothing to looking at incorporation [?]. 24/7 project those other kinds of things that let people get back out in the community work earn taxes folks They earn they pay taxes They pay taxes if they’re working if they don’t we’re paying our taxes to house them I’d much rather have them out working if they’re safe [?] being out there working So I think there’s a lot of moving parts left in this.
I think there’s a lot of discussion left I honestly don’t believe I’m pretty sure if they held a vote today, they wouldn’t have two-thirds in either house Unless they come up with something very concrete by that September meeting, I think it’s going to be another failure. And I think as a legislature, and I would suggest to the governor, we don’t need another failure. I would. Think it would be much smarter to continue this task force, give them a few more meetings, and allow more input, and not just have this task force deciding what we need and where we need it.
I think having the city of Sioux Falls involved, that’s good. But some of the things that came out of the meeting, I just, I can’t do the math. That’s why we used to call it fuzzy math, our, the crazy math we’re teaching our kids now. Yeah, it just doesn’t add up, but. Anyway, we have a long road ahead of us and there’s a lot more to do in the next couple of months.
[30:00]
Our incarceration meeting, we’ve pushed it off till October because I think we have so much more. I make the analogy, a lot of people complain about our education system. Well this whole... Our incarceration system is huge and it’s a bit of a mess. It would be like trying to fix our entire education system with three meetings. It’s not doable. Yeah, we can have some recommendations to fix a few things, but we’re not going to fix the whole thing with this.
Dave Roetman: Fair enough. Kevin. This has been the Making Waves Podcast. My name is Dave Roetman. We’re here with Senator Kevin Jensen. Thank you.
