John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight
Members of a Correctional Rehabilitation Task Force plan to talk through South Dakota’s options for a prison seminary program, learn more about behavioral health at a soon-to-open Rapid City women’s prison and take comments from the public on Wednesday.
The third meeting of the task force will begin at 10:30 a.m. Central time at the Military Heritage Alliance in Sioux Falls, about an hour and a half after the planned groundbreaking for a $650 million men’s prison on a plot of undeveloped land a few miles to northeast.
Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden formed the task force in the run-up to a special legislative session vote in September on the men’s prison, an outgrowth of a separate task force dubbed Project Prison Reset. The reset group was formed in the wake of the Legislature’s rejection in early 2025 of a more expensive plan to replace the oldest buildings on the South Dakota State Penitentiary campus in Sioux Falls, and Rhoden said the work of the rehabilitation task force would help guide discussions on how a new facility would address ongoing issues with repeat offenders, security and societal reentry within the Department of Corrections.
Around half of exiting inmates return to prison within three years of release — a higher average than neighboring states.
The rehabilitation group is led by Lt. Gov. Tony Venhuizen, who also served as chairman of the prison construction task force.
The agenda for Wednesday’s meeting includes a presentation on the findings from a multi-month study of South Dakota’s existing prison programming, conducted by the Council of State Governments Justice Center. The nonprofit organization has a $160,000 contract with the state to offer technical support to the task force through March 2027.
The meeting will also include a presentation from Northwestern College, a Christian university in Orange City, Iowa, on how it might operate a prison seminary program endorsed by the rehabilitation task force’s faith-based subcommittee and Rhoden. The program would train inmates to serve as degreed seminarians and faith leaders within the state’s prison system, using a curriculum developed in Louisiana in 1995 that’s since spread to several facilities across the U.S.
Corrections Secretary Nick Lamb told the task force in December he was initially skeptical of the program’s value until he saw it implemented in Illinois, where Lamb worked as a prison administrator for several years before stints in New Mexico and Iowa.
A leader of the department’s behavioral health system will also offer a rundown of programming at a new $87 million women’s prison that’s nearing completion in Rapid City. The new prison includes a building devoted to a mother-infant program, which lets qualifying inmate mothers live full-time with their babies under supervision. The program has shown promise since its implementation at the Pierre women’s prison in 2022, officials say.
Venhuizen, in a commentary published by The Dakota Scout, said the new women’s prison will also include a drug therapeutic treatment unit large enough to serve 96 inmates at the 288-bed facility. He also pointed to recent investments in security meant to stem the flow of illegal drugs into state prison facilities.
Just under half the women imprisoned in South Dakota are serving sentences for drug offenses, according to the state’s most recent Department of Corrections Annual Statistical Report, and eight inmates died from drug overdoses in 2025 in South Dakota prisons.
The task force is scheduled to take comments from members of the public starting at 2:15 p.m. Wednesday. A tour of the penitentiary campus in Sioux Falls, open only to task force members, will follow the meeting’s adjournment at 3 p.m.