John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight
The South Dakota Department of Corrections aims to cut its turnover rate by 12 percentage points in the next year, in part by offering recruits a better idea of what they’re in for.
The number of open security staff positions has plummeted in recent years, Corrections Secretary Nick Lamb told the Legislature’s Joint Appropriations Committee on Thursday at the Capitol in Pierre, from a high of 27% in late 2022 to 5% today.
But security staff turnover has nearly doubled since 2020, from 17% to 33%. Around 70% of the department’s 971 correctional employees work on the security side.
Reducing the turnover is one of what Lamb called the agency’s “wildly important goals” for the coming year.
When asked by Sen. John Carley, R-Piedmont, why people are leaving, Lamb said age and prior experience are major factors.
“This work is not for everyone,” he said.
Increased starting pay for security staffers, from $17.89 a few years ago to $25.50 an hour today, has helped the agency recruit people to serve, he said, but “we’re having a hard time retaining them.”
About 45% of those who leave officer positions do so within their first six months, he said.
The department plans to work through ways to give recruits a better sense of what the work might be like upfront, Lamb said, possibly through videos on day-to-day operations.
At the moment, officers have a four-week training academy in the classroom, 40 hours of orientation and 40 hours of on-the-job training.
Some moves in that direction began before Lamb’s arrival in November, Director of Operations Amber Pirraglia told the committee. The agency began to assign field training officers to follow new employees through their first six months of work and “really through their first year.”
“That is something we’ve implemented in the last year that’s been very successful, and hopefully we’ll see a better retention rate with those new officers,” Pirraglia said.
‘Kids’ overseeing inmates
Gov. Larry Rhoden hired Lamb as secretary following the resignation of Kelli Wasko last fall. Lamb came from Iowa but also worked in prisons in New Mexico and Illinois.
He told the committee he more or less stumbled into a career in corrections “because I needed a job.” He was a high school dropout who “made mistakes,” he said, and earned his GED after completing basic training with the Army. He would eventually earn a master’s degree in behavioral medicine.
Back in 1994, his GED and military training were just enough to qualify him for a prison job in southern Illinois, Lamb said. That was a win for him as a young father who’d been making around $4 an hour in a factory that was set to close.
He grew to love corrections, he said, because “you can save a life” by talking to and listening to inmates.
“I got to realize that inmates are people, too,” Lamb said. “God does not make trash.”
The big difference between Lamb’s experience and that of some current staff members at the penitentiary is that prison jobs didn’t go to teenagers at the time in Illinois. There was too much demand for those positions for older adults.
The story is different for South Dakota’s prisons in 2026, Lamb said.
“I’m here to tell you that I’ve got 18-year-old kids working the galleries at night, with adults,” said Lamb, using a term for the tiered floors of inmates at the penitentiary. “God bless them. They’re going to make mistakes, but that’s what we have now.”
The security work being done by those younger officers is more difficult in some ways, as well, he said. He pointed to K2, a drug typically sprayed on pieces of paper that killed most of the eight men who died of drug overdoses in South Dakota prisons last year.
“We didn’t have the synthetic cannabinoids that we have now that’s so hard to detect,” Lamb said, using the technical term for K2 as he tapped a pad of paper. “It could be on this piece of paper right now, and I wouldn’t know it and you wouldn’t know it.”
Nursing shortage
There are fewer open security staff positions than the department has seen for years, but the story is different for correctional nurses.
The agency took over correctional health from the Department of Health in July 2023.
Brittni Skipper, the director of finance for corrections, told the committee that 58 of the DOC’s 175 clinical positions are open.
“That’s clearly not covering the open shifts we have for clinical, so to cover those shifts we have to have existing staff work overtime, or we contract for nurses,” Skipper said.
The state budgeted $4.6 million for traveling contract nurses for 2026. That’s up from $4.2 million in 2025 and $3.1 million in 2024. Another $279,000 was budgeted for overtime for clinical staff.
There are incentives in place for nurses, Skipper said, among them a student loan repayment plan and a $10,000 hiring bonus, paid in two $5,000 installments in a new correctional nurse’s first two paychecks. The nurses have to stay for two years to keep the bonuses.
Nurses also get an extra $7.50 an hour at clinics that are “below minimum staffing levels.”
Last year, Skipper said, the state paid $10,000 bonuses to 29 employees, 15 of which are still employed. The state requests the $10,000 back if the nurse leaves before two years are up, and Skipper said the agency has been repaid in each case.
Rep. Jack Kolbeck, R-Sioux Falls, mentioned South Dakota’s push to train nurses at public universities in recent years and asked Skipper if having more nurses in the state has made a difference.
“Are you getting the applications?” Kolbeck said.
The state hired a recruiting agency to look for nurses, Skipper said, a strategy that worked well with security staff recruitment. The same agency reached out to 400 nurses last year, got replies from 13, and only five of them were interested.
“The reason that they noted for that is because they don’t want to work in a correctional facility when they could be in a hospital or a clinic,” Skipper said.
Pay for nurses is “similar” to what a hospital might offer, Skipper said, but “we just can’t compete with what contract nurses pay.”