Well, we think we’ll have enough beds in the new Rhoden/Venhuizen prison to hold all of our overflow prisoners, but South Dakota’s prison population growth may put that thinking in peril. A new report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics finds South Dakota’s held 9.3% more people behind bars in 2023 than in 2022. Only Maine and New Mexico had higher prison populations growth rates, 11.8% and 12.4%, respectively. Minnesota had the slowest prison population growth in the region, at just 1%.
The new prison is supposed to add 1,062 bunks to South Dakota’s penal system, raising total capacity to 3,837. The new clink will take four years to build. If the prison population kept growing by 9.3% a year, then by 2029, we’d have 6,418 inmates, and we’d have to eminent-domain Kristi Noem’s farm and house extra inmates in her horse barn.
But the state’s 2024 figures show a total prison population of 3,694, a 1.9% decline from the feds’ reported 2023 figure. It’s hard to say which way that seesaw trend will go, but if we average those two years to a 3.7% growth rate, we’d reach 4,434 prisoners by 2029, still over the projected capacity with the new prison by 597.
Lieutenant Governor Tony Venhuizen had better hurry up his rehab and recidivism task force to come up with some solutions to keep us closer to last year’s 1.9% decline than the previous year’s 9.3% boom to make sure the new prison doesn’t open with the same problem as the current penitentiary.
Related Prison Pop Trivia: States the current administration has characterized as hellhole warzones requiring military occupation posted low growth or actual declines in prison populations:
- Illinois: 0.7%
- Oregon: –1.6%
- California: –1.7%
So, the more Republican South Dakota gets the stingier and more cruel the residents become. Not only has the SDGOP failed Indigenous Americans by not expanding Medicaid it has failed veterans and the elderly: its historically loyal voter base. But hey, if Tony Venhuizen wants to feed from the Qochtopus gravy train he has to prove he’s numbed to the misery, hopelessness and despair his father-in-law and political party have heaped on South Dakotans.
Hey Lar, the horrible Medicaid expansion was approved through the heinous ballot measure, lettered as Amendment D, in the 2022 general election. It has been a fiasco of wild expansion ever since. That’s why they made it so these fellows have to work and not just sit around and watch TV eating snacks all day.
You mean they shouldn’t do what you do grudz? Was it really horrible and heinous? The real fiasco of the US of A is that it has the most expensive health care system in the world because it isn’t a right its a privilege. Republicans want every embryo to be born but once born, no care for you unless you’ve got the money honey, they’ve got no time for you.
Every European country does it better. We keep trying to Jerry rig our system and it will never work.