Governor Larry Rhoden and Lieutenant Governor Tony Venhuizen, who led the Governor’s prison refit study committee, scored a big policy and political victory yesterday as the Legislature approved their plan to replace South Dakota’s 144-year-old penitentiary with a new $650 million prison built two miles down the Big Sioux River on Benson Road in Sioux Falls.
The votes on Special Session Senate Bill 2 authorizing the prison project were 24–11 in the Senate and 51–18 in the House. The Senate vote was closer than the House, with no votes to spare to clear the two-thirds vote threshold necessary to appropriate the money.
The nays came almost entirely from radical right-wing Republicans resorting to any rhetorical device available to just say no to a long-delayed upgrade to a big, expensive building.
Rookie Senator Lauren Nelson (R-18/Yankton) recited some nonsense she must have pulled from ChatGPT about how 650 million dollar bills would reach 44 miles into the vacuum of space or cover 1200-some football fields or weigh as much as the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro. Nelson’s wandering imagery laughably dodged the actual policy questions at hand, instead asking us to muse over the equivalent weights of a sack of dollar bills we will never see and a statue that most South Dakotans have never seen and will never weigh in person. (What, Nelson couldn’t make a comparison more relevant to her South Dakota colleagues, like that 650 million dollar bills would weigh as much as the poop produced by the cattle in a single state-subsidized dairy in one year?) And if sheer size in dollar bills mattered, Nelson never would have voted for the state budget, in which she approved spending more than 11 giant Jesus statues’ worth of George Washingtons, thus surely shifting the Earth’s rotation and orbit, triggering massive earthquakes and sending us spiraling into a fiery death at the heart of the Sun (well, that would obviate the need for a new prison…).
Nelson’s build-nothing-ever mugwump colleagues were somewhat more policy-oriented but mostly just as distracting in their unsuccessful arguments. Some opponents contended we could spend this money on other more beneficial public uses, when in fact we can’t, since the bulk of the money is in the incarceration construction fund, established by the Legislature in 2022, and allocated solely for the purpose of building a prison. Some opponents contended (speciously, I suspect, since I doubt the right-wing gives one cool damn about making life better for prisoners) that we should draw up plans for improving rehabilitation and reducing recidivism first, which is ridiculous: authorizing the construction of a new prison with better rehabilitation facilities is a step toward improving rehabilitation and making possible whatever reforms come from the next big study group Rhoden has charged Venhuizen with leading. Some opponents claimed that we shouldn’t award a chaotic, poorly run Department of Corrections with a new expensive facility, but that argument fails to acknowledge that providing a 21st-century building should help DOC run better than it does now in a 19th-century prison.
In a particularly hot jumble of a speech, rookie Rep. Josephine Garcia (R-5/Watertown) aped Speaker Jon Hansen’s (R-25/Dell Rapids) last-ditch effort to turn the prison vote into a culture-war battle by claiming the DOC is promoting transgenderism. Garcia and Hansen were deploying the usual tactic of pressing social hot buttons to distract from their inability to grasp and win on real policy issues. (Besides, Garcia and Hansen ought to realize that building a new prison frees up the old pen as a dungeon for all the transgender people they’ll round up and lock away when they felonize men pretending to be women!)
Not one thing the Hansen/Nelson/Garcia cabal said yesterday changes the physical and fiscal facts: South Dakota is currently stacking prisoners beyond capacity in a 144-year-old facility that poses safety risks to guards and inmates alike. Building a new prison now (well, starting now, so we have a new facility in four years) improves working conditions for guards and improves the opportunity we have to rehabilitate criminals so they don’t come back for another stay on our dimes (which, for each reincarcerated individual, would weigh as much as 69 Lauren Nelsons and 92 Josephine Garcias—great God, the enormity!).
In securing the votes to pass SB 2, Rhoden and Venhuizen demonstrated leadership, engagement in policy, and legislative skill that Kristi Noem never mustered when she pushed for an $825-million facility in Lincoln County that drew vehement local opposition and failed to pass the Legislature last winter after she bailed to play ICE Barbie in Washington.