SIOUX FALLS – South Dakota’s repeat offense rate for people who leave prison can return to the low point it saw a a dozen years ago, the state’s corrections secretary said Tuesday.

Nick Lamb, now six months into his role atop the Department of Corrections, laid out the agency’s plan Tuesday at the Correctional Rehabilitation Task Force at its meeting in Sioux Falls. The plan includes work release programs, residential housing for inmates and a top-to-bottom restructuring of how the department operates.

Recidivism measures how many inmates return to prison within three years of their release. The figure for South Dakota stood at

 50%

in the most recent data, which was based on the performance of inmates released in 2021.

South Dakota’s lowest recidivism rate in the last two decades was 39% in 2014.

“We’ll get back there,” Lamb said Tuesday.

Lamb told reporters after the meeting he wants “to start getting in the business of closing prisons” during his tenure.

“Our population is too high for our state,” Lamb said. “We need to get our population down, but we’ve got to give the offenders the tools they need that they haven’t always had.”

Several recommendations presented on Tuesday, by Lamb and other criminal justice experts, will require more staff and funding.

State Rep. John Hughes, R-Sioux Falls, worries that the Legislature’s budget-setting committee will balk at new spending.

“My concern is that we put all these elaborate proposals together, then when we get to appropriations we’re going to hit the wall,” Hughes said.

Under Lamb’s predecessor, Kellie Wasko, pay for inmate work performed outside the prison walls

was increased to minimum wage

. After that policy change, fewer communities and organizations contracted inmate workers for community service jobs.

Rep. Tim Reisch, R-Howard, said most of the roughly 250 minimum-security prisoners he oversaw during his tenure as corrections secretary participated in work release.

“They got up and they all had jobs. They were used to getting out of bed, going to work, getting in a habit of that,” Reisch said.

When he toured the prison last year, fewer than 20 were working, he said.

Lamb has cut inmate wages below minimum wage since he started.

“We reached out to a lot of these communities, basically asking if they need help,” Lamb said. “We lowered the wage, which upset some people, but we need them out working.”

This summer, inmates will work at Sioux Falls parks and at its regional landfill, and they’ll prepare the fairgrounds in Huron for the State Fairgrounds in August. They’ll also help out during Riverboat Days in Yankton, and pitch in on tournament preparation for the National Field Archery Association.

Lamb also wants to establish a residential corrections program. He shared a presentation showing how such a program

operated in Iowa

, where he served as deputy director of institutional operations for the Iowa Department of Corrections before his move to South Dakota.

In Iowa, most residential facilities were filled with people on probation, parole or work release. He envisions a similar program in South Dakota, with housing outside of traditional prison settings designed to help transition back into the community, but he hasn’t finalized details or a timeline.

“We’re going to try it,” Lamb said. “I’ll be honest, I haven’t talked to the lieutenant governor or anybody else about it, but we need to try it. It works.”

The program has been in Iowa for decades. Iowa’s three-year recidivism rate peaked at 38.9% in 2019 and has since fallen to 32.8%, based on the

latest data available

.

“I’m not trying to throw you a sales pitch,” Lamb said, but residential programming is “a good idea.”

Lamb said he doesn’t want to replace programs like the one run by the Sioux Falls-based nonprofit St. Francis House, but to add to it.

St. Francis House doesn’t cap how long residents can stay and limits rent to $250 a month. Lamb said a state-run program would include a time limit and higher rent.

A lack of “felon-friendly housing” is a major driver of recidivism, said Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken, who’s leaving his position soon after two terms in office. The problem won’t improve without government involvement, he added.

“If the state ever chooses to invest in St. Francis House programming, it’s money well spent,” TenHaken said.

The percentage of inmates who got rehabilitative programming increased from 27%to 44% between 2023 and 2025, according to a report presented Tuesday by the Council for State Governments Justice Center.

The national nonprofit was contracted to analyze the state’s prison system and help guide the task force’s work.

Despite the gains in programming, the group reported, 46% of inmates released in 2025 received none. Access was also limited by where inmates were held, due to space and staffing restrictions.

The justice center recommended several changes, including:

• Creating a rehabilitation and reentry division and hiring several new positions.
• Creating a centralized waitlist for programs.
• Streamlining the program catalog to reduce overlap and fill gaps.
• Sequencing programming to cover an inmate’s entire stay, rather than stacking programs in the last few months of their sentence.
• Creating a dedicated parole violation program track.

Many of those recommendations hinge on hiring and retaining adequate staff — one of the department’s most significant challenges, according to the group.

Sara Friedman, program director with the Justice Center, said her team consistently heard in interviews that the department tends to shift employees around when attempting new initiatives, rather than hiring. That creates gaps for inmates seeking programming.

Sometimes, for example, shifting staffing patterns will leave facilities without enough security staff to transport inmates to classrooms.

“Technically, you’re fully staffed, but you’re fully staffed so thinly that the moment one thing goes wrong, the waterfall effect is people are not getting their rehabilitative services,” Friedman said.

Lamb told South Dakota Searchlight after the presentation that he wasn’t surprised by the staffing recommendations. The department lacks adequate staff to backfill for sick or vacationing employees, he said, though he didn’t say how many more employees would need to be hired to address the issue.

The department is already working to create the new rehabilitation and reentry division and centralize its scheduling.

The task force plans to meet two more times before it’ll finalize its recommendations for the Legislature ahead of the next session, which starts in January.

— This story was originally published on southdakotasearchlight.com.

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