Republican gubernatorial candidate Toby Doeden says South Dakota needs to put inmates back to work like Bill Janklow did:
And number 2, you know, not to me specifically, but you mentioned it, and it’s important enough for me to follow up on what Governor Janklow did by putting the inmates to work was an effective program. That has largely gone away. We don’t do that anymore. So we’re paying to house criminals in our state prison system, many of which are nonviolent criminals, OK? So we’re paying to house them, but we’re getting nothing in return. Why aren’t we putting these folks to work, right? That’s certainly one of the ideas I look at, you know, we’ll look at as governor and reinstating. I think Governor Janklow got that one right [Toby Doeden, interviewed by Meghan O’Brien, “How Governor Candidate Toby Doeden Says He’ll Phase Out Property Taxes,” South Dakota Searchlight, 2026.05.15, from transcript].
Doeden is wrong on philosophy and facts.
First, philosophically, saying we get no return on what we spend to house convicts is false. We invest in prisons because we seek justice. We punish those who violate the law by denying them liberty. We protect the public by separating convicts from the general population. We shelter, feed, and supervise lawbreakers with an eye toward persuading them to straighten up, fly right, and not come back after we release them. Even if criminals don’t do a lick of work and instead just sit in their cells for months or years, we get something for the money we invest in incarceration.
But we do get work from our prisoners. Toby, have you ever heard of Pheasantland Industries? It’s the current incarnation of the prison industries established at the state pen over a century ago (in the 1920s, according to Pheasantland Industries’ FY1993 annual report, or maybe in our first full year of statehood, 1890, according to the FY2025 annual report), long before Bill Janklow was a glimmer or mote in anyone’s eye. In FY2025, Pheasantland Industries had 165 offenders making license plates, signs, braille materials, clothing, and other goods and working in their commissary warehouse.
It’s also self-sustaining, covering its $5,174,060 budget with the revenue from its sales.
Getting labor out of criminals is not an essential part of corrections. But offering inmates opportunities to work seems a reasonable way to build inmates’ job skills and sense of purpose and responsibility and perhaps make them more likely to succeed in the world when they leave prison and never come back.
Putting inmates to work is a reasonable idea, and South Dakota already does it. It wasn’t Bill Janklow’s bright idea, and it isn’t Toby Doeden’s.