Mark Milk, left, and Terry Van Zanten stand outside a Metal Craft Industries building and talk about changes at the state Department of Corrections. (John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight)
Early this year, Terry Van Zanten and his family began to empty out their work space inside the Jameson Annex of the South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls.
It took months to move Metal Craft Industries out of the shop where maximum security inmates had worked for more than two decades, earning market-rate wages building parts for lawn mowers and other equipment.
To hear Van Zanten tell it, the Department of Corrections (DOC) bullied his company out the door.
There were unclear and unreasonable demands for change, he said, made with little guidance and a tighter timeline than he could manage without putting his business and clients in jeopardy.
Van Zanten saw Metal Craft’s DOC partnership as a benefit for prisoners , the prison system and taxpayers.
Former inmates lament loss of prison employer and its ‘family’ atmosphere