Before its first meeting Wednesday, the Correctional Rehabilitation Task Force had the chance to sit in with the Legislature’s Initial Incarceration, Reentry Analysis, and Comparison of Relevant States Interim Committee to hear a presentation from the Council of State Governments Justice Center. Program directors Madeleine Dardeau and Sara Friedman talked about CSG Justice Center’s work to help Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming improve prison and post-prison programs to reduce recidivism.
Dardeau and Friedman say that whatever the task force recommends to get offenders out of South Dakota’s prisons and keep them out, those initiatives must be based on solid data. Therefore, through its Advancing Data in Corrections initiative, CSG Justice Center is funding an embedded data analyst through May 2026 to “strengthen reentry data analytics” and “enable data-driven strategic decisions”. The resident data analyst will “compile renetry best practices and identify gaps in data, reports, and processes”; build a “reentry metrics framework” that includes data on housing, employment, and health; and “advance the design of a leadership dashboard for real-time insights.”
Fair enough—we can’t make evidence-based decisions if we don’t have an expert gathering and analyzing evidence.
Dardeau and Friedman note that federal money makes this Resident Analyst position possible. Fortunately for South Dakota, the Resident Analyst program was not among the numerous Council of State Government projects from which King Don withdrew federal funding this year. The Administration yanked 373 grants awarded by the federal Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs; the rescissions took back an estimated $500 million out of $819.7 million in original grant amounts. The feds reneged on 12 grants to the Council of State Governments originally worth $88.5 million; a cut proportional to the OJP-wide rescissions would have taken $54 million out of CSG’s justice programs, including CSG activities supporting the wildly popular Second Chance Act, which gave CSG money to help states battle recidivism with job training, substance abuse treatment, education, housing, family programming, mentoring, and victim support.
CSG Justice Center will help the South Dakota understand the strengths and weaknesses of its current correctional rehabilitation programs and study how its performance compares with others states’ correctional systems. But reckless budget cuts in Washington have already made it harder for us to take action on whatever evidence that analyst gathers.
They have to get ready for Kristi and her boo.