Criminal Behavior: Fancy Buildings Don't Appear to be the Answer

Why is our prison population so high and why are so many people returning?

People are still up in arms about the men’s prison that has been proposed for Lincoln County. The problem is people know that the families of prisoners are plagued with problems, including criminal behavior. As a result, very few people want prisons in their communities.

Unfortunately, South Dakota has a higher incarceration rate than the national average. Sadly, the go to solution has been to build more and more places to house criminals (prisons) rather than address the root causes of the problem. The state has tried to lure people into welcoming prisons by suggesting they create jobs. South Dakota is already at close to full employment and prison jobs are not viewed as high quality employment. As a result, that tactic isn’t working.

There are organizations, however, that are salivating over a new prison. Architecture, engineering, and construction companies make money on the project. Doctors and hospitals make money on medical care. Food service companies make money on food. Repair and maintenance companies make money on services. Real estate developers make money building low income housing. And the list goes on and on. Unfortunately, these people have money and influence, so they are exerting political pressure to move forward with the Lincoln County project.

Sadly, the taxpayers are the one’s caught holding the bag. As would be expected, they are upset paying billion of dollars for new facilities. We are in the process of paying for a new women’s prison near Rapid City and a new men’s prison in the Sioux Falls metro area.

And the cost of incarceration keeps going up (see page 17 of the pdf). In fact, it costs about $33,650 to keep a person in a state prison for a year. With about 3700 inmates on average, the taxpayer is paying about $125 million each year to keep people imprisoned in the state system. There are additional people in local and county jails.

If the citizens don’t want more prisons, we have to do something to stop criminal behavior. Here are a couple of options:

Reduce Recidivism - Right now at least 43% of those released end up back in the system (see page 91 of the pdf). While there is some change from year to year, the numbers are staying fairly constant. Just keeping people from returning to prison would make a huge dent in our prison demands.

Improve Income - The median income of incarcerated people is substantially lower than the income of non-incarcerated people. As a result, it is critical that we stop the wage depression that is occurring with foreign workers since we are not only putting the worker and his/her family into poverty, but are pulling citizens below the poverty line as well. This is especially important since real inflation has been running between 9% and 14% for decades.

It is becoming brutally apparent that tracking everyone toward college is not the right solution. If some kids are checking out by middle school, let’s get them trained and making money so they can succeed.

Reduce Substance Abuse - Most prisoners have issues with substance abuse (page 70 of the pdf). Substance abuse can lead to problems with employment which leads to issues with income.

So rather than rush to build fancy, costly buildings maybe we need to focus on things that change how many people we have in the system. We need to reform our education system and get kids into the trades and out of trouble (if they want to go onto college later that’s an easy transition).

Then we need to make sure we do everything possible to get those in the system turned around. That way we won’t have a revolving door on our prisons and our pocketbooks.