South Dakota DOC Facing Tight Budget
Prison officials hope a federal grant to reduce repeat offenses will help the South Dakota Department of Corrections control inmate population growth in a tight budget year. News from the Rapid City Journal.
Gov. Mike Rounds’ proposed 2011 budget is about $1 million
lower than the DOC’s request. The agency asked for $108,069,335 based on projected prison numbers through June 2012.
Corrections Secretary Tim Reisch said the $106,982,478 budget forwarded by the governor will be enough to cover prison operations for the next 18 months. That’s dependent in part on controlling recidivism with officers through the federally funded Second Chance/Re-entry program in Sioux Falls, Rapid City and Pierre.
The governor’s budget projects only 157 more inmates in 2011 than 2009. “There isn’t a lot of wiggle room,” Reisch said.
Until 2007, South Dakota’s prison population increased by about 100 prisoners every year. The population dropped in 2007 and 2008.
“We had back-to-back reductions, which is really unprecedented since we’ve been keeping statistics,” Reisch said. “Forever, we’d been going up.”
The drop preceded a national trend. Earlier this month, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that the nation’s prison population grew at a slower pace in 2008 than it had for eight years.
In South Dakota, however, the population began to climb again in 2009. As of November, there were 3,387 adult inmates in the state, up 43 from the end of 2008.
If the numbers grow too quickly or unpredictable factors such as high-cost medical procedures for inmates drive up the budget, Reisch might need to ask the Legislature for more money. “There are a lot of things out there that can break the budget,” he said.
The DOC will use $749,749 from the federal government every year for the next three years to pay the Second Chance officers, Reisch said. The new employees will help coordinate the placement of paroled prisoners in jobs, apartments or substance abuse programs.
The extra help could make a difference, according to Tom Cihak, a member of the Board of Pardons and Parole. Parole officers can oversee 60 to 70 parolees at a time.
“It would definitely help to have more people,” Cihak said.
An inmate with a steady job and stable housing situation has a better chance at returning to society as well, he said.
“It’s expensive to house them here, and they do a lot better on the outside if they’re ready to be there,” he said. The tight corrections budget for South Dakota still is more manageable than the situation in some other states.
Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Ohio are looking at sentencing reform to reduce the amount of time prisoners are held. Others have considered early releases for nonviolent offenders.
The last time South Dakota commuted sentences en masse was 1986, when then-Gov. Bill Janklow released 36 people in response to overcrowding.
Reisch doesn’t expect such a move in the near future.
“I could not tell you that we’d never entertain the thought, but the governor’s proposal doesn’t have any early releases,” Reisch said.
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