It was a sunny morning in early June when I visited Jeb Williams, director of the North Dakota Game and Fish Department, at its headquarters in Bismarck. While we talked, we saw outside the spacious window of his office a young family walk to a trail near the parking lot. Some of them were carrying fishing poles.

I inquired about it, and Williams told me that Game and Fish manages a pond it stocks with fish on the property and families come to use it often during the summer months. He said I should check it out after our meeting. I said I would, but first we had other things to discuss.

It’s not the first time that Williams and I have met like this. We try to meet once every few weeks to catch up on news and events from the department and the outdoors community. This time, he spoke about the advisory meetings Game and Fish held this spring across the state and some of the things that came out of the meetings.

One item is talk of possibly proposing a bear season, a first for North Dakota.

It would be in the Walhalla area, where Williams said people are seeing more of the animals to the point “where landowners might like to harvest a bear,” he said. “Individual hunters are also seeing enough of them that they’re starting to feel maybe it’s time.”

He said the department will take time this summer to do its due diligence in determining if a bear season would be positive for North Dakota.

“We’re a data-based agency that likes to have more than anecdotal stories when it comes to setting seasons or regulations, those types of things, and I think the public expects that of us. I think having some baseline information is important and the responsible thing for us to do, and so we’re going to be doing that this summer and discussing it with the public this fall and next spring for a potential bear season in fall 2027.”

Williams also addressed the Governor’s Soil Health and Habitat Program, a $6.5 million, state-funded initiative designed to improve soil, create wildlife habitat and support farmers. It also will benefit hunters. The program, funded by the Outdoor Heritage Fund and through in-kind donations, was developed with input from agricultural and conservation partners and is administered through North Dakota Association of Soil Conservation Districts. The North Dakota Game and Fish Department serves as a co-applicant.

The pilot program provides five-year contracts to approved private landowners who put habitat on their property, who will then be compensated in the form of annual rental payments, cost-share for grass establishment, and a first-of-its-kind $10 per acre crop insurance credit for unproductive cropland converted to grassland habitat. Producers who enroll acres into the North Dakota Game and Fish’s Private Land Open To Sportsmen (PLOTS) program receive additional incentives. The department provides the crop insurance premium reduction for converting marginal, unproductive cropland into perennial grass habitat.

Williams said not all agricultural land is productive, and those lands that are not could become important areas for conservation. “There are pieces of land that can be utilized in other ways — improving the soil health and putting habitat and grass on the landscape. Any time you can put habitat on the land in the form of grass and wetlands and trees, those are features that wildlife respond to.”

Williams said there have been a lot of conversations about the program since it was announced by Gov. Kelly Armstrong during a press conference in late January, and those discussions will continue. It’s good to clear the air.

“It’s not like us taking a township and putting it all in grass,” Williams said. “It’s taking chunks that a particular producer or landowner looks at as being unproductive acres and turning it into productive wildlife habitat for pheasants and other animals.”

Williams is excited about the initial response for the program and said Game and Fish and its partners are working on ways to keep the program funded for the years ahead.

As our meeting wrapped up, we saw more people in the parking lot heading to the trail that would take them to the pond. Williams said sometimes on days when things haven’t gone as well as he had hoped, and he sees young people and their parents show up to use the pond, it brightens his mood. It reminds him of the department’s overall mission.

He said, “that’s what we’re here for” — to provide natural resources to North Dakota residents, now and into the future.

As promised, once I left Williams’ office, I walked to the pond and encountered a prairie snake on my walkabout. Soon, I met up with the fishing family we saw from his window — Christy Hosek, of Bismarck, and seven of her 15 children. She said they visit the pond every week, and most every time the kids catch fish. While I was there, 10-year-old Cole caught a small walleye. He held it up so I could take a picture of him with the fish before he released it back into the water. The pond is a catch-and-release-only water.

For those who have the need or interest in visiting the Game and Fish headquarters, a modern building in a quiet area on the outskirts of Bismarck, check out its catch-and-release pond. It’s a pleasant spot with a mowed grassy trail around it and some wildlife to view as well. There’s even a picnic area at the trailhead where parents and their young anglers can relax with a sandwich and drink. Visitors must bring their own lunch, of course.

As I began my walk back to my car, I heard shouting from the pond. Another young angler caught a white bass.

Do you have a story idea or outdoors news tip? Reach out to Andrew Weeks, outdoors editor for the Grand Forks Herald, at aweeks@gfherald.com.

Andrew Weeks is an award-winning journalist who has reported for newspapers and magazines. Prior to joining the Grand Forks Herald as its outdoors editor, Weeks was editor for several years of Prairie Business, a publication of the Grand Forks Herald and Forum Communications Co. Before that role, he was outdoors editor for a daily newspaper in Idaho.

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.