Two years after approving a tough-on-crime sentencing law, South Dakota is scrambling to deal with the price tag for that legislation: Housing thousands of additional inmates could require up to 2 billion to build new prisons in the next decade.
That's a lot of money for a state with one of the lowest populations in the U.S., but a consultant said it's needed to keep pace with an anticipated 34 surge of new inmates in the next decade as a result of South Dakota's tough criminal justice laws. And while officials are grumbling about the cost, they don't seem concerned with the laws that are driving the need even as national crime rates are dropping.
"Crime has been falling everywhere in the country, with historic drops in crime in the last year or two," said Bob Libal, senior campaign strategist at the criminal justice nonprofit The Sentencing Project. "It's a particularly unusual time to be investing 2 billion in prisons."
Some Democratic-led states have worked to close prisons and enact changes to lower inmate populations, but that's a tough sell in Republican-majority states such as South Dakota that believe in a tough-on-crime approach , even if that leads to more inmates.
The South Dakota State Penitentiary