Rep. Greg Jamison was flat out wrong. Last November, the Sioux Falls Republican said his colleagues in the Legislature would support reforms to improve prison inmate recidivism and rehabilitation. In a South Dakota Searchlight story, he predicted he could “almost assure” that “every legislator” would support the reforms.
Jamison, who is a real estate broker when he’s not in the Capitol, should stick with home sales. He has no future as a fortune teller.
Despite his rosy prediction, Jamison’s colleagues didn’t want to have much to do with recidivism and rehabilitation reforms during the 2026 legislative session. They snubbed reforms, even with the guidance of the Correctional Rehabilitation Task Force. Created by Gov. Larry Rhoden, the task force was formed to get lawmakers who were skeptical about the state’s prison rehabilitation efforts to endorse the $650 million men’s prison project in Sioux Falls.
In the 2026 session, lawmakers did manage to pass a bill that requires the Department of Corrections to transport released prisoners to their home county, the county where they were sentenced or a location equivalent in distance to the closer of the two options.
What they didn’t do was pass House Bill 1086, which would have provided DOC with $2.7 million over five years for leadership training for inmates and prison staff aimed at reducing repeat offenses, known as recidivism. The bill was endorsed by the Joint Committee on Appropriations on a 10-6 vote. It lost in the House on a 42-23 vote, failing to garner the two-thirds majority needed for bills requiring funding.
According to a story in The Dakota Scout, lawmakers who voted against the bill expressed concern about cost, effectiveness and broader government expansion.
Republicans’ concerns about government expansion are understandable. However, it just makes sense that if the government is going to incarcerate people, it should expand enough to try to ensure that they don’t commit more crimes when they’re released.
Numbers were also a problem according to Rep. Mary Fitzgerald, a St. Onge Republican. “We can’t really compare our (recidivism) rate to another state because we do calculate that differently,” Fitzgerald said.
No matter the method of calculation, there’s one thing about South Dakota’s recidivism numbers on which we can all agree: they’re too high.
According to the DOC’s 2025 annual report, half of the people released from prison in South Dakota return to prison within three years. That’s the state’s highest recidivism rate in the past eight years. According to a South Dakota News Watch Fact Check, this state’s recidivism rate puts it in the top 10 compared to other states, no matter how those calculations are made at the state level.
Here’s hoping that the Correctional Rehabilitation Task Force turns out to be more than just a bone thrown to wary legislators in an effort to convince them to endorse the new prison. For the task force to be successful, it must face some daunting challenges:
• A majority of inmates are released after a year or less, cutting the time that they can be exposed to rehabilitation programs.
• The need for rehabilitation programs is great. In 2024, 91% of male inmates and 97% of female inmates had a substance abuse problem.
• The passage of the bill allowing inmates to return to their home county or the county where they were convicted means that rehabilitation programs and services that help released inmates transition back into society must be available statewide.
Once the task force has done the hard work of finding solutions to these problems, lawmakers must be ready to stop playing politics and fund programs that boost rehabilitation and reduce recidivism rates.
If they don’t, it looks like all they’re interested in is making sure that there are always going to be plenty of customers for their brand new prison.
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