Pen Pen: Server Your Community—Come Work in Prison

Under King Don, Uncle Sam wants you to execute members of Congress, undermine public health, and sell out allies to flattering dictators.

Meanwhile, Lifer Sam wants you to serve your community by serving his. In his latest essay from the South Dakota Penitentiary, Samuel Lint, Inmate #16334, urges civic-minded South Dakotans to come work at the Pen and put Governor Rhoden’s promised focus on rehabilitation into practice, not to make his life in prison easier, but to make life for the rest of us, in free society, safer:

You ever hear the one about the prison that was so short-staffed the prisoners started asking the community to come be correctional officers? Sounds like a joke, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not a joke; it’s South Dakota.

Make no mistake: this is a call to action for citizen engagement. The potential for lasting transformation through direct culture change is real and it is right now. All you have to do is come get a job—or volunteer—in prison.

Today my home is broken, and it affects you every day. Almost all of my neighbors are going to be your neighbors soon. What kind of neighbors do you want? As this system collapses under it own ineptitude, I see an opportunity to replace the unhealthy, aggressive, unsympathetic, short-sighted, reactive, never proactive, poor communicators with people from our community who have respect, empathy, and a real ambition to bring productive transformation to this prison system. We need people who understand that by transforming lives here, you transform the outcome once prisoners go home. Simply said, changing lives in here saves lives out there.

I ask that you approach this situation with patience and awareness that people generally end up in prison not because we’re truly bad but because we weren’t raised right, or were raised by people who weren’t raised right and were missing mentors in our youth. One of the strongest indicators for criminality is having been a victim of crime. Many of us are broken and are in various stages of healing, but we get no help from the system that takes your tax dollars and says they’ll correct our behavior. Be quick to forgive but even quicker to offer guidance. Never forget that the responsibility is on staff to exhibit the behaviors that you would like prisons to exhibit.

Society is plagued by the mindset that this problem is someone else’s to solve. I want you to take a role as part of the solution, not a role as a victim of an unfixed problem, or worse, a bystander who missed the opportunity to jump in and change outcomes. You have the ability—the responsibility—to deal with this problem personally; if you don’t, you are partially responsible for the next preventable tragedy. You are a member of a community that is confronted daily with the Department of Corrections’ failure to restore its prisoners into anything close to a good neighbor.

Transformation in prisoners is not possible without transforming our prison system. You have the opportunity to grow this system right now by filling the vacancies here with people who understand the real role correctional officers are supposed to fill.

Prison is the place society sends us to when we break the law. What’s easy to overlook at that point is that if a little bot grows up to be a criminal, the community that raised that little boy failed that little boy. People passed up the opportunities to offer guidance, skipped out on their mentoring obligations to watch TV, or simply walked right past a child in true need of assistance. “Not my kid, not my problem” seems to be the pervasive sentiment, and it flies until it doesn’t, until your car gets jacked or that kid sells your kid an overdose and the community is up in arms, looking around, asking why nobody did anything to prevent this tragedy.

You have the opportunity to step into a new role—a second chance at being that mentor, that role model or life coach to an adult in need.

Now here’s the kicker. If you enter the prison today as a new officer, you will not be trained to fill that role. You will be trained under the mindset of a system that is folding in on itself. You will be told that every prisoner is a dangerous and deceptive liar and that your only job is to go home alive…. We need a rapid and robust influx of decent people to come help us create an environment where people who come to prison can leave better off than they were when they showed up. Come help us bring about the change we all want to see.

This is your chance to do something most people talk about but don’t know how to do—truly change a broken system—and all you have to do is step up to the challenge. Public Safety Starts Here.

The prison system has failed its mandate to keep South Dakota safe. It has been run by people who don’t put forth the effort to rehabilitate prisoners. This failure happened so many times that the community demanded change. So, in usual fashion, we passed a law in 2023 that (1) doesn’t do anything to keep people safe from people getting out of prison, (2) doesn’t do anything to help people grow, find their purpose, gain new skills, or understand the impact of their crimes on victims in an effort to prevent more tragedy, and (3) only makes the punishment stiffer. This short-sighted bill, called Truth in Sentencing, duplicates laws that have been repealed in other places because it makes prison systems more violent for staff and prisoners by overcrowding the prison with people who have no hope or incentive to grow.

I’m asking you to see the big picture. The community failed the children. The children grew up and became prisoners. Prison administrators never trained their staff to take an active role in helping people grow. The Legislature stripped, slashed, and gutted recidivism programming twenty years ago. Prison administrators knowingly returned broken people to society, and far too often, there were tragic outcomes. The community demanded action, but community leaders failed to address the roots of the problems and supported a “solution” proven to make matters worse.

We need people who have done the self work, understand the enormity of the undertaking, and are willing to serve your community, in prison as staff or volunteers or in your community mentoring children. Either way, I’m calling on you to help people heal and grow so they stop hurting themselves and others. Let’s bring Truth in Corrections.

—Samuel Lint, Inmate #16334, South Dakota Penitentiary, postmarked 2025.11.21; edited and links added by CA Heidelberger, Dakota Free Press.