Guest post: Olson on scandal at SD Corrections

Editor's note: Shad Olson continues to call out red state failure at the highest levels of South Dakota's executive branch. Little wonder Attorney General Marty Jackley wants to move to DC.

What follows is posted at Olson's Faceberg page.

As is always the case in political scandal and neverending gamesmanship of the public trust, sinking ships spring more leaks as they founder. Lips get looser as the bilge pump fails and the bow sinks. Even if the iceberg was struck intentionally for headline effect.

It's certainly happening at that famous prison on a Sioux Falls "hill" that's reportedly being purposely scuttled, mismanaged and manipulated as a political set piece to jam a billion dollar project down the taxpayer gullet in South Dakota. Pricetags like that require first rate crises as irresistible marketing tool. Nothing like a few inmate deaths, guard assaults, and plummeting inmate conditions to make the case.

And it's so much worse than you know.

Besides an ongoing civil rights lawsuit over inhumane treatment and a food standard that Kristi Noem wouldn't even have served to Cricket prior to his condemnation to capital punishment, (elaboration later) this reporter is aware of an ongoing fentanyl and methamphetamine trafficking ring inside the Sioux Falls penitentiary, aided, abetted and even consumed by guards and staff, and used as fuel for sex abuse against inmates who can't legally consent and between fellow guards and corrections staff that can but shouldn't.

According to inside sources, fentanyl is trafficked freely inside the walls of the Jamison Annex, with the transportation secrecy of guards and distributed by both guards and inmates for in-house consumption. Contraband profits are split similarly and the resulting atmosphere is one of narcotics surplus and shortage, food service feast and famine, skirmishes over dwindling substance supply and cheats, and the general milieu of a facility firmly in the grips of an administration that's been given orders to let chaos reign supreme to add headlines, bodybags and window dressing for a now $725-million prison project. The pieces slip neatly, if not tidily together with Hegelian dialectical precision.

Prison problem. Public outcry. New prison pricetag. A previously bantered figure of $650-million is now being called a target, not a cap for the project's total cost. Change orders pending.

In one especially horrific case, a corrections officer's family member describes being driven to suicide after learning the officer had spent tens of thousands of her dollars on the in-house illegal drug supply and confessed to having sex with both fellow staff members and inmates while under the influence. The revelations of drug abuse and an Abu Ghraib-style sexual free for all led to the woman's emotional and financial breakdown and a stint in a South Dakota psychiatric ward after a heartbroken attempt on her own life.

At last notice, the officer in question remains duly employed at his penitentiary post, despite numerous complaints by whistleblowers to the internal misconduct. Tip of the aforementioned iceberg.

A civil rights lawsuit filed in Sioux Falls federal court complains of substandard and calorically inadequate daily meals which were served as a way to bolster commisary sales as added margin for both the prison meal services vendor and the commisary coffers.

The federal complaint alleges the serving of food not fit for human consumption and in many cases, known by corrections staff to be expired and spoiled prior to serving, causing inmate sickness, diarrhea and vomiting.

Inmate testimony reveals a marked degradation in meal prep and food quality after a contractual transition in meal service vendors and after the same company was awarded a contract for commissary foodstuffs inmates are allowed to purchase out-of-pocket or via commisary account donations from friends and family.

Inmates allege their daily caloric intake was drastically curtailed at the same time in what they also allege was a cost-shifting maneuver to boost purchase of commisary foodstuffs by starving inmates out fo their own funds, donated, earned or otherwise.

The same lawsuit highlights a plethora of civil rights abuses, including longer than allowed incarceration in solitary confinement, prisoners who were restrained in prone positions and left to wallow in their own urine and excrement and prisoners who were threatened with poisoning of coffee and milk in retaliation for reported abuses by corrections staff members and DOC officials.

In a broad overview of the tenure of Corrections Secretary Kelly Wasko, replete with a drastic and years-long rise in inmate on inmate violence and multiple murders, inmates allege that declining conditions are a deliberate campaign to drive the overall prison population to violence and unrest and produce the chaos, dysfunction and dangerous conditions to justify a new South Dakota prison project that has been repeatedly rejected by conservative lawmakers but will again be reconsidered at a special legislative session on September 23, 2025.

Opportunity borne of chaos. All a coincidence, I'm sure.

One can imagine that once and if ink is applied and the new prison project is approved, brakes will finally be applied to "Operation Chaos" at the existing Sioux Falls facility and the South Dakota public will be sufficiently assuaged that hostage lawmakers have been suitably responsive to an organic crisis driven only by an outdated facility, inmate overcrowding and the need for new amenities.

28 Department of Corrections officials, officers and staff members are named in the civil lawsuit that, after being denied an appeal by the U.S. 8th Circuit, has now been revived in South Dakota federal court with a future trial date still pending.