Wismer on new prison

When this blog asked Susan Wismer to run for governor in 2014 she told me Cory Heidelberger and Madville Times were just too radical for her. Heidelberger supported Joe Lowe in the Democratic primary so that weblog never really got behind Wismer as a gubernatorial candidate but ultimately her choice of running mate sank her campaign. State Senator Wismer repeatedly warns about the risk of Earth haters holding supermajorities in the legislature and that the state is living in the "dark ages." 

Her reasoning is hardly mysterious. It’s all about the money a too big to jail banking racket, video lootery, a medical industry triopoly, prostitution, the Sturgis Rally, policing for profit, sex trafficking, hunting and subsidized grazing bring to the SDGOP destroying lives, depleting watersheds and smothering habitat under single-party rule. So, instead of building a billion dollar prison the state should spend the money to house, feed and educate people. 

Former Senator Wismer is still speaking out.

The South Dakota Legislature, dominated as it has been for decades by the GOP, has known for decades that we needed a new state prison. What has saved the state from federal lawsuits over inhumane prisoner treatment I don't know: perhaps our powerful senators. In the meantime the state legislature worked on roads and education and nursing homes and tax cuts instead of a new prison. Then, when the Biden COVID money started flowing, it actually became possible to start planning for a new prison using that federal bonus money. Money was set aside in a savings account for a prison project, but rather than use her political capital to do an unpopular but necessary state project, Kristi put it off while she was off campaigning for other jobs.

And the slug of new legislators who came to Pierre this year had the hubris to think that legislators who came before them hadn't already considered and learned everything that the current committee is learning...again. If Kristi had been as determined to build a replacement penitentiary, which she knew is an emergency need of the state, as she was to build a west river gun range and fancy expensive one-stop office buildings in Sioux Falls and Rapid City, South Dakota would not be facing a $1 billion prison project today. We would already have had a project in process at a guaranteed price of much less than what we will end up paying now. But they didn't follow up with the investments in education and addiction treatment and child protection and sentencing reforms that would have reduced corrections system clients. They persisted in the typical GOP rhetoric of "these are not essential government services...we don't want to fund them."

16 years ago when I first came to Pierre, Chief Justice Gilbertson had finally convinced Pierre to invest in a trial drug court, which allows a defendant to avoid prison if they agreed to enter into an addiction treatment program and follow some very strict conditions. Before agreeing to fund more than one, Appropriations Committee demanded documentation that the drug court paid for itself, because addiction treatment wasn't an essential government service worthy of government funding. The committee was unwilling/unable to fathom, without such $ and cents proof, that it was a worthy investment.

So, the proof was enumerated in voluminous reports: e.g. child support paid by a working parent as opposed to one in jail, child protection services not required, judicial system fees paid by a working, not incarcerated, citizen. Of course, the only numbers that counted were the savings to the state budget...not the budgets of local governments, and certainly not the cost, pain and suffering that the state could have saved their citizens in the last 50 years, if our legislature had chosen long ago to invest in our most vulnerable populations. [Wismer, Faceberg post]