I always look forward to South Dakota Searchlight’s daily email of state and national news. The editor who puts that email together probably didn’t mean for it to happen, but one day recently there was quite a juxtaposition of two stories about prisons.
In the state news there was reporting about Gov. Larry Rhoden doing the right thing by suspending legislative action on the new prison and appointing a committee to seek a way forward on the project. In the national news there was another story about a $1 billion contract the federal government was signing with GEO Group, a private prison company, for detaining up to 1,000 immigrants in New Jersey.
The story about the appointment of Rhoden’s committee to work on the prison project was good news for South Dakota. That project has been lamented by various groups ever since its inception. Rhoden’s call for a “reset” was the right one after the Legislature proved that it was unwilling to release the funding for the 1,500-bed men’s prison that would be located about 15 miles south of Sioux Falls…