Last updated on 2023-10-25
KELO-TV runs a story with the headline “Lincoln County Commission Weighs in on Prison Plans”. But nowhere does the story cite any action by the Lincoln County Commission that indicates a formal expression of the elected body’s position on the state’s plan to move the State Penitentiary from The Hill in Sioux Falls to The Flat Spot four miles south of Harrisburg. Nor do any of the commissioners quoted “weigh in” as individuals. None of the commissioners say “Yay! Let’s build it!” or “No way! Put it in Crooks!” (which, since we don’t have a town named Murderers or Drunk Drivers, would be the next logical choice). The commissioners just point to questions without expressing their own positions, let alone indicating any position the commission as a whole may take:
“I probably have gotten 10 to 20 emails, several phone calls,” [Commissioner Tiffani Landeen] said. “Most people are concerned about it, concerned on what it will do, more so the social impact in the county, and how it may affect property values, if it does.”
…Lincoln County commissioner Jim Schmidt looks to the future when he brings up an extensive county plan that’s in the works.
“This may change a lot because of the zoning requirements that go around where the prison is,” he said. “How does it change the land use. I mean, there’s any number of things that are going to happen as a result of this thing.”
Another big question is the facility’s sewer system.
“I think an unanswered question yet is what they’re going to do for sewer, if they’re going to be able to tie into a sewer system or if they’re going to lagoon this thing,” Schmidt said.
…Commissioner Joel Arends shared with KELOLAND News on Monday that he is hoping to hear what landowners in the area and the City of Harrisburg have to say, while commissioner Jim Jibben said he wants to know about other sites that were under consideration [Dan Santella, “Lincoln County Commission Weighs in on Prison Plans,” KELO-TV, updated 2023.10.17].
Santella reports that the Lincoln County Commission has asked the Department of Corrections for more information about the new prison, but the Lincoln County Commission has not weighed in on the prison yet.
Put razor wire up around South Dakota’s border and speed up the process of eveyone being in jail.
I have long had the idea in kind, that should I win one of those multi-million-dollar lottery things, I would buy all the property in s small SD town, wall it off and put in an admission gate, with a charge for tourist to come see how they work. Residents could live tax and mortgage free (just pay their utility bills, groceries and personal transport expenses) so long as they agreed to follow the company town rules @ property use and maintenance (The town would pay for major maintenance needs beyond ordinary day to day stuff) and played nice with the tourists.
@Richard jogged my memory. A bunch of us guys from around Madison moved to Colorado mid 70’s from the Black Hills. The running joke was a sign near Mystic hyping a “mock Indian village” much like “mock slave plantations” used to be ubiquitous in USA’s south.
Whenever one of us brought up how weird growing up in SD was we’d quote the sign, “SEE HOW THEY LIVE!”.
The Department of Corrections, does not, and will not, take any of the local considerations into mind in locating the prison. It’s not how they work. Sewer?? they’ll just work that out on the way. Land values?? Not our problem. Social impacts of families of prisoners moving to Canton and Harrisburg…which they will?? That’s a problem for the city, school district, and county to solve. Affordable Housing for prison personnel who are substantially underpaid given the Sioux Falls-Lincoln County job market?? Too big a problem for the DOC…someone upstream will have to tackle that one. The DOC will build the walls and cells, and will attempt to keep the prisoners warm, dry, and fed while they do the time for doing the crime. Everything else is somebody else’s problem.
Where would you fellows put a new prison?
grudznick would just keep jamming more and more fellows into the old one. Bunk them tighter.
Oh, I bet you’d just let all the criminals out because they are liberals.
A new prison location? On the banks of Lake Kampeska in Codington County for sure.
That’s not a bad idea, Mr. P.h. I do not think there is a large island in The Kampeska Lake, but they might be able to build one because it is probably very shallow. Kampeskatraz, they would call the new facility.
New maximum security prisons are all underground. Usually twenty to fifty floors deep. No windows and no sunlight for prisoners. All you see when driving by is three deep fences of electrified razor wire, a hundred yards of land mined gravel open space and a little building smaller than a grocery store.
Inmates exercise in a concrete pit resembling an empty swimming pool, also designed to prevent them from knowing their location in the facility. The pit is large enough only for a prisoner to walk ten steps in a straight line or thirty-one steps in a circle. Correctional officers generally deliver food to the cells.
A big slogan around the Lincoln County way in the past few years has been, “No Eminent Domain for Private Gain.” This kind of implies that eminent domain for public gain is OK, which it is. And, yes, the DOC can and should put it “wherever they want,” regardless of who it impacts and what it may or may not do to land prices, because wherever they would put it would have the exact same issues. Jim Schmidt should know that Lincoln County zoning ordinances do not trump the state’s use of eminent domain. However, he does have an interesting point about the sewer line, but my guess is that state engineers figured out how to solve that problem before they bought the land.
Interesting how different this prison is from the proposed CO2 pipelines. The new prison is a state project on state land, so eminent domain won’t be an issue: the state already owns the land, and, as Dave says, the state can do whatever it wants with the land it controls.
The neighboring landowners’ only hope of stopping the project would seem to be getting their legislators to pass a bill redirecting the funding to a different location, but then legislators would be overriding whatever study has already been done identifying the Lincoln County location as the best spot to build a new primary penitentiary.
I would like to think there’d be some logic to putting the penitentiary in some god-forsaken remote location, like maybe Larry Rhoden’s ranch, but the DOC has noted that they have to get people to work there. They already can’t recruit enough guards in the biggest metroplex in the state; they’d have an even worse worker shortage out in Union Center or pretty much anywhere else not within a 20 -minute drive of Sioux Falls.
If Harrisburg and Lincoln County do try to box the prison out by denying utility service, it would be really interesting to see the state embark on a revolutionary effort to build a self-sufficient prison complex with intense water recycling and conservation, waste recycling and composting, food grown in a prison greenhouse (and maybe some test-tube meat!), and on-site power generation from solar and geothermal installations and biogas from the inmates’ own poop.