PIERRE — For the past five years, conversations about prisons and how to manage them have played out as one tumultuous bout of realignment and soul-searching after another for South Dakota’s leaders.

Wardens . were exposed. and came and went. Lawmakers over how to spend money they set aside for prisons.

and spiked. When the dust settled, the state had endorsed a new in Rapid City, a new in Sioux Falls, and a .

But something else happened along the way: Prison officials quietly stood up a program they now view as a solid win for some inmates and their families.

Since 2022, qualifying inmate mothers have lived full-time with their children in a house on the campus of the South Dakota Women’s Prison in Pierre that looks nothing like a prison.

In the three years since its launch, none of the women who’ve left prison after participating in South Dakota’s Mother-Infant Program have returned to state custody.

It’s too early to calculate any long-term impact, but Corrections Secretary Nick Lamb told the Legislature’s budget-setting committee recently that he likes the odds for success.

More than 40% of South Dakota parolees return to prison within three years of their release. In states with similar programs, Lamb said, the repeat offense rate for participating moms “is something like 2%.”

Through fiscal year 2025, which ended on June 30, 17 women had participated, according to the Department of Corrections Annual Statistical Report. Ten had been released at the time the report was issued, and corrections spokesman Michael Winder said none have returned to prison.

Another mother-infant house is nearing completion at the in Rapid City, which is set to open this year. The program in Pierre will continue.

“There’s a beautiful new building out there built just for this,” Lamb told lawmakers.

A new program for an old building

The program began under former Department of Corrections Secretary Kellie Wasko.

To be eligible, the mothers must be on minimum custody status, have 30 months or less remaining on their sentence and be serving time for a nonviolent offense.

The women and their children live in two fused-together Governor’s Houses just outside the main prison complex in Pierre. The homes are prefabricated dwellings, built at Mike Durfee State Prison in Springfield and typically sold to low-income families.

The structure had been there for years.

Until around five years ago, it was known as the “PACT” house, a nod to its use for a less-expansive familial bonding program called Parents and Children Together that was launched by former Gov. Bill Janklow to allow female prisoners weekend-long visits with their kids.

Interest in PACT had waned by the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Warden Aaron Miller told South Dakota Searchlight during a recent tour. The pandemic shuttered it altogether.

Wasko moved to reopen its doors as a full-time home for inmate moms and their kids shortly after her arrival in March of 2022. Colorado, the state where Wasko had worked in corrections previously, has a mother-baby unit for inmate moms.

‘Just learning’

On a recent Friday, the moms were gathered in the shared living area at lunchtime, sitting in a semicircle of couches as an episode of the children’s program “Bluey” played on a flat-screen television.

There were seven women living in the house with their kids that day — four boys and three girls, ranging in age from two months to 18 — but the building can hold up to 10. Women typically stay in the program for 30 months.

One of the moms, Sara Bernie, said it can feel “pretty cramped” with 10 families, but “we make it work.”

Bernie’s daughter, Spiryt, turns 1 this month. They’ve been there since Spiryt’s birth.

“We’re just learning to walk,” Bernie said of her daughter, wearing a fresh-looking pair of Minnie Mouse sneakers and a long-sleeved Minnie Mouse shirt.

Bernie moved from Michigan to Yankton to work at a restaurant. She’d been in South Dakota less than a month when she was charged with drug distribution. She’d been pregnant about a month, too, and spent the start of her sentence in the main women’s prison, transitioning to the mother-infant program when Spiryt was born.

“Coming over here, it is a totally different world,” said Bernie.

Having Spiryt right there, she said, has served to motivate her. Bernie has completed a kitchen management program. The program, run by food service provider Aramark, earned her early discharge credits and put her in a position to make federal minimum wage working in the prison kitchen and save money for her future. Most inmate jobs pay around 50 cents an hour.

With Spiryt at her side as a motivator, Bernie said, “I am 100% focused on going back out.”

Her other two children, ages 6 and 14, are in Michigan. She wants to go back there when her sentence is up in early 2028.

Sometimes, prison staff will clear the adults from the prison’s recreation gym so the littles can take over. Aside from those moments, the children don’t see the inside of the prison. When it’s warm, they play outside.

Sitters fill role for moms, prison system

A babysitter or correctional officer watches Spiryt when Sarah goes to work, leaves for recreation time or goes to church. The babysitters are the only other women in the house most evenings. Overnight, it’s often just the moms and babies.

Bernie is CPR certified, as are all the mothers in the house. That’s also a qualification for the babysitters, who are minimum security inmates interviewed first by the staff, then by the moms.

“We vote on the babysitters,” Bernie said. ” They usually work out pretty well.”

The daytime correctional officer, Karen Boyer, often relies on the babysitters to help manage the chaos of a seven-family house. On some days, Boyer spends a lot of time away from the building, taking babies to doctor visits outside the prison in a Chevrolet Suburban packed with car seats.

“It’s kind of like school,” she said. “When one gets sick, they all get sick.”

The children start to feel like grandkids after a while, she said.

It’s a feeling the babysitters get, too.

“When the kids leave, it’s like they’re losing someone in their family,” Boyer said.

Kay Cain has been a sitter since November. On the outside, Cain was a pediatric nurse, so working with kids came naturally. She typically takes care of Dennis, an 18-month-old with a mop of curly hair who gives fist bumps when asked for “knuckles.”

“You’ve kind of grown on me, haven’t you?” she said to Dennis when asked about her favorite part of the job.

Like Bernie, Dennis’ mother came from out of state, and was living in Yankton when she was arrested. Destiny Hogan said she was pregnant and using fentanyl and methamphetamine at the time.

“If I wouldn’t have gotten arrested, I don’t know if either of us would be here,” Hogan said.

Now, having lived side-by-side with Dennis his whole life, she’s closer to him than she’s been with any of her five other children.

“He’s the only one I’ve been there with from day one,” Hogan said.

Birthdays, holidays

Cameras in the corners, khaki prison-issued pants and the supervising correctional officer’s uniform are the only outward signs that the house doubles as a prison facility.

There are two bathrooms, one with a Peter Pan theme and another with a unicorn theme, on either side of the building. Each bedroom has a theme, as well, and there are hand-painted cartoon images on every wall outside the bedrooms. Every painting was done by an inmate.

Meals are delivered each day for the women and children. Every month or so, everyone will have what Bernie called a “big meal” together.

The children get birthday parties, and Bernie wrote out a wishlist for Spiryt. A little boy got an electric drum kit at the last birthday party.

Christmas gifts come by way of an angel tree, where community members buy the toys listed on tags hanging from a tree.

A lot of the gifts come in a similar fashion, originating with community members or community partners. Others come from prison staff members.

Wasko, the former corrections secretary, took particular pleasure in playing Santa Claus, Corrections spokesman Michael Winder said.

By policy, kids are allowed one bag of gifts at gift-giving time, Winder said.

“You’d never seen a bag so big,” as the ones Wasko would deliver, he said.

Community support

That the PACT house was available at the time of the program’s launch was a big help, allowing the state to avoid building space from scratch or retrofitting areas inside the women’s prison to make them function more like living spaces appropriate for infants.

As with gifts for the kids, a lot of supplies come through community support, said Miller, the warden at the women’s prison.

Churches pitch in for car seats, collapsible cribs, toys or furniture, he said, as do local supporters like the Pierre office of a Canadian nonprofit called Birthright, founded in 1968 to support women with unplanned pregnancies.

Birthright has kept the building stocked with diapers and wipes since the program’s launch.

An organization called Right Turn offers educational programming to the mothers, Head Start offers early childhood educational materials and teaches moms how to bake and cook, CPR training comes from the Sanford Frontier and Rural Medicine (FARM) Project, and the group Disability Rights of South Dakota helps mothers connect with the resources they’ll need on the outside as they prepare for release.

The program costs the Department of Corrections $15,000 a year, a figure folded into the $8.8 million budget for the women’s prison in Pierre.

Building bonds

Spiryt got restless as she sat on her mom’s lap during her conversation with a reporter and prison administrators. The tot’s eye was drawn to the neon cord of the earbuds plugged into Bernie’s inmate-issued tablet. Spiryt flopped to her left and grabbed the cord.

Reflexively, Bernie stretched a hand to her window sill, grabbed an identical but non-functioning pair of earbuds and swapped them into Spiryt’s tiny hands.

“I hide these up here and give them to her when she does this,” Bernie said, smiling down at Spiryt. “That way she still thinks she’s getting away with something.”

That’s precisely the kind of attentive understanding the program wants mothers to develop with their children.

“The premise of the program is that they will be able to bond with their child,” Miller said. “It’s teaching moms how to be moms.”

Miller was around in 1997, when the Pierre women’s prison first opened. At that point, former Gov. Janklow’s move to create a weekend visitation house for inmate mothers was viewed with scrutiny.

The prison houses women at all security levels and has a minimum security unit, but the main building was designed to house maximum-custody inmates.

“At the time, no one could imagine having kids in a maximum security facility,” Miller said, even if the overnight visits took place in a conventional house designed for families outside prison walls.

The women who stayed there through the years tended to do better on the outside, Miller noted, but “when they were only there for the weekend, it was totally different.”

South Dakota is one of at least nine states with prison nursery programs, last month, the oldest of which is in New York. The programs have expanded as the number of women entering prisons has grown, from around 13,000 in 1980 to nearly 86,000 in 2023.

‘Not here to punish inmates’

The program came up as the Legislature’s budget committee got an update last month on construction at the new women’s prison in Rapid City. The mother-infant program building was nearing completion, Lamb told the committee.

One senator, Piedmont Republican John Carley, asked Lamb how the prison keeps the program from feeling like a prize for the participating moms.

“What’s the difference between them truly feeling they’re incarcerated and dealing with the crime maybe they committed versus, ‘hey, this is a lot of wonderful free stuff,’” Carley said.

Lamb told Carley that his job is not to punish inmates. The incarceration is the punishment, he said.

“The ladies that are back there no longer have their freedom,” Lamb said. “So they’re serving their punishment by being with us.”

The low rate of repeat offenses from women who’ve gone through similar programs across the U.S. shows its value as a rehabilitation tool, Lamb told Carley as he invited the senator and anyone else on the committee to visit the shared family space on the Pierre prison campus.

Lamb, a father of seven, also said there’s a moral component at play. Babies, he said, should not be separated from their mothers for a mother’s misdeeds.

“Harming the mother is one thing,” Lamb said. “But separating the child from the mother is something totally different.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. South Dakota Searchlight maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seth Tupper for questions: info@southdakotasearchlight.com.

When it comes to education in prison, policy and research often focus on or improves the of those who are serving time.

But as I point out in my new edited volume, “,” education in prison is doing more than changing the lives of those who have been locked up as punishment for crimes – it is also changing the lives of those doing the teaching.

As director of a and as a and who teaches in both colleges and prisons, I know that the experience of teaching in a correctional facility makes educators question and reexamine much of what we do.

My book collects experiences of college professors who teach in prison. A common thread is that we all went into education behind the wall thinking about ourselves to some extent as experts but have since critically reflected on what we know through interactions with incarcerated students and the institutions that hold them.

Rewriting the book

One semester in 2020, I volunteered to tutor for a class on something that occurs frequently behind prison walls: conflict and negotiation. The class featured two books that are considered essential to the field. The first is “,” a 2014 text that invites readers to reflect on how conflict has played out in their personal lives. The second is “,” a 2011 text described by its publisher as a “universally applicable method for negotiating personal and professional disputes without getting angry – or getting taken.”

“You know, I know these are very important books and all, but this isn’t really what would work in here,” one incarcerated student said after a few class meetings, gesturing to the prison walls. “Here, you can’t talk openly about your feelings like the authors want us to, and the rules of relating to people are different.”

I responded that his observation was astute, and that knowing both sets of rules – and how to switch between them – could be profoundly useful. For example, I theorized, I imagine he behaves differently during yard time than on a phone call with a family member on the outside. If the textbooks about conflict on the outside didn’t adequately address how to handle conflict in prison, I suggested he write an equivalent book for conflict negotiation in prison.

“Maybe I should,” he chuckled, and looked around to his classmates. “Maybe we should.”

The experience showed me how even though there are textbooks that are considered “universal,” that universality may not always extend itself to correctional institutions.

A new understanding of status

As a full professor and chair of the sociology department at Clark University, a small, private university in Worcester, Massachusetts, is used to being accorded a certain degree of respect for her professional accomplishments and credentials. But none of those things mattered once she passed through the gates of medium-security prisons for men located in Massachusetts.

“Status that I might have as a scholar, full professor, department chair … is rendered invisible as we enter prison,” Tenenbaum writes. When passing through security, “I have been abruptly instructed to obey commands and my questions are ignored.”

Encounters with correctional officers are frequently unnerving for educators, particularly at the entrance gates.

“I find myself in the position of needing to second-guess what I may (or may not) have done wrong and defer to people who are considerably younger than I am,” Tenenbaum continues. “There were times that I followed rules only to be scolded when the rules appeared to be differently interpreted from one day to the next. To be in the subordinate role of a power dynamic is a humbling experience. … It takes having expectations defied to realize that they even existed.”

Whether the rules are about clothing faculty members are allowed to wear or the number of pieces of paper we can carry in, the decisions are frequently about power. In her chapter, Tenenbaum writes that having had her status questioned has led to a new sense of humility and altered the power dynamics in her professional world. She does not take it for granted that her expertise is currency for respect.

Modeling apology

When an incarcerated student told Bill Littlefield, a retired English professor, that the novel “Frankenstein” had no relevance to his experience or life, Littlefield’s first reaction was to push back.

“‘Good writing is always relevant,’ I said, ever the professor,” writes Littlefield. Littlefield tutors and teaches at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Concord and Northeastern Correctional Center. He is also author of the newly released book “,” as well as popular host of WBUR’s sports radio show “.”

“He said he would read it, certainly … even though he knew that the story of the lonely, ultimately vengeful monster created by the gentleman scientist’s preposterous, insane overreach would have nothing to say to him,” Littlefield writes. “I argued that he was wrong.”

But in the week that followed, Littlefield said he came to see his own reaction as a mistake and an act of arrogance.

“When we met again, I made a point of apologizing to the student, in front of his classmates,” Littlefield writes. “I told him that I’d realized it was no business of mine to tell him what was relevant to his life. If he did the reading, he’d decide for himself.” The student thanked him.

More college in prison

As college programs in prison , I fully expect that in the coming years there will be more and more college professors being transformed by the powerful experience of teaching behind bars. This is especially so given that Congress has on federal financial aid, namely, Pell Grants, for people who are incarcerated.

In 2022, there are 374 prison education programs run by 420 institutions of higher education operating in 520 facilities, according to the maintained by the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison.

Collectively, college programs in prison have been shown to that a person who participates in them will return to prison after being released. But as I show in my book, the programs are also dramatically changing the perspective of the college professors who teach them.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons License. Read the .

Juvenile lock-ups in the city are facing a staffing “crisis within [a] crisis” as overworked guards manage an aging and increasingly listless population of detainees.

Youth advocates and union officials are asking for more staff and structure in the detention facilities as the city’s child welfare agency struggles to maintain a workforce dealing with injuries and exhaustion.

According to the Administration for Children’s Services, only 401 of the required 850 so-called Youth Development Specialists were working as of Monday. This as nearly 250 positions have been left unfilled, and more than 200 specialists are out on worker’s compensation or other reasons.

Social workers and kids primarily want more and better “programming” outside of their halls, which includes educational courses, job training, therapeutic work and physical activities. Meanwhile, union members are calling for the city to hire hundreds of workers that were promised years ago.

Both groups say more social and educational stimulation for the young detainees — which would require more staff — would help quell violence and foster a healthier environment.

“There is a sitting audience that is thirsting for knowledge and thirsting for positive activities while they’re there,” said Ron Schneider, a social worker with Brooklyn Defender Services. He said his young clients have noted a marked decline in creative outlets since the pandemic began.

Older ‘Youth’ Present Challenges

The recently released shed some light on the current state of affairs at New York City’s juvenile facilities, even as most eyes were focused on the problems at .

The data showed an older population, staying longer than before at the city’s two secure juvenile detention centers, Crossroads, in Brooklyn, and Horizon in The Bronx.

Currently, the population at the facilities is shifting towards late teens: 48 of the 139 kids currently detained are over 18. Youth detained there as minors can now stay until they are 24, following the 2017 passage of , which removed minors from adult jails and the purview of the city’s Department of Corrections from the juvenile lockups.

That presents a challenge, say staff, who complain that older detainees are physically more difficult to control, and can be a bad influence on younger kids.

According to the MMR, the average daily population of youth in juvenile lockup decreased 7.6% across the city’s network of detention facilities — from about 129 kids in 2020 to nearly 119 in 2021.

But fewer kids are returning to detention as well: Some 49% of detainees locked up in 2021 had previously been incarcerated, down from 58% of youth last year.

The dive in population was “largely the result of the COVID-19 pandemic” according to the report. The Legal Aid Society also to release children held as the virus raged — and ultimately, dozens were .

This marked the mayor’s third management report since state legislators passed the landmark Raise the Age legislation, which removed New York from the short list of states that automatically prosecuted teens as adults.

Lisa Freeman of Legal Aid called the shrinking population “a wonderful thing that has come out of the pandemic and something that should be a lesson going forward.”

Regularly Scheduled Programming

For advocates of youth still on the inside, programming and school remain paramount.

“The kids do state that if it’s not for school, they’re sleeping all day long, there’s nothing else to do. So they are asking for programming,” said Schneider.

Last year, THE CITY found that kids in detention doing remote learning were stuck on mute and could not speak to their teachers for much of the pandemic. Now, youth have returned to full in-person schooling, according to ACS.

Schneider visits his clients at Crossroads on a daily basis and said that the structure young detainees receive from school and programming outside their units helps to dampen potential conflict at the facility — and staves off depression and loneliness in kids.

Before the pandemic, he said, outside agencies would provide consistent in-person programming such as mentorship, job training, even work through the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program. But since COVID-19 descended on the facilities, youth have reported that activities have been severely limited.

ACS would not say what percentage of programming at Crossroads and Horizon is by outside providers, or how much of it is happening as scheduled.

As of Wednesday, at total 139 youth were living at Horizon and Crossroads and about 21 children were staying in less-secure settings. Many are being held there while still awaiting a trial.

ACS blamed the now typical 38 days of stay on court slow-downs. That’s up from 29 in 2020 and more than double the 17-day average in 2019, according to the agency’s numbers.

“If we want safer facilities where youth have the opportunity to spend the majority of their time productively working towards their employment and career goals, the city needs to make a significant investment in workforce programming,” said Laurel Gwizdak Rinaldi, director of youth services at the Center for Community Alternatives,  in a statement to THE CITY.

Rinaldi’s organization helps run programming at Horizon and Crossroads, and called for more city funding to help career-minded youth.

“Ideally youth would be engaged every evening and weekend in high-quality vocational, certification, pre-apprenticeship and college access programming,” she explained, but added that hands-on workplace training in detention is “ far more costly than your typical arts and recreational afterschool program.”

An Understaffing ‘Crisis’

To Darek Robinson, the vice president of grievances for SSEU Local 371, which represents the youth development specialists who run the facilities, agrees that programming is “necessary, definitely necessary.”

“But you’re gonna need constant supervision,” he added.

He added, “That’s been falling a little short because they’re short staffed. Just too many people out on worker’s comp.”

According to ACS, as of Oct. 4, 201 staffers were out on sick leave or on worker’s compensation — leaving less than half of the number of staff required to properly run the facilities on duty. ACS also changed shifts from seven to 12 hours as the coronavirus .

Union President Anthony Wells called the mix of understaffing and the pandemic “a crisis within the crisis.”

“The state implemented Raise the Age too soon,” said Wells, “because it didn’t give us enough time to really prepare. We don’t want the kids treated as adults. But it could be done a lot better.”

Similar to Rikers, staff shortages have meant exhausted workers, said Robinson.

“You’re doing 16 hours a day, 18 hours — you feel [that] by the time you get home you’re not getting proper sleep, you’re exhausted, you’re not 100% so that has an immediate effect on the decision making process, watching kids — has an adverse effect on performing your job,” he said.

That’s where mistakes are made on the staff’s end, he said. The union continues to await the result of for the return to traditional 7-hour shifts.

Robinson also called for a way to hold detainees, especially the older ones, responsible for their actions, and charged assaults have been an ongoing threat to staff.

According to the Mayor’s Management Report, rates of violence between detainees resulting in injuries across all types of juvenile detention have held steady since 2020, dropping slightly from .35 to .34 per 100 youth.

Attacks on staff by youth causing injury dropped from .30 in 2019 and 2020  to .27 incidents per 100 detainees as well, according to the MMR.

Weapon recovery rates did go up from .22 to .25, as did that of illegal substances from .07 to .14.

The report did not include use of force by staff on children. But last year a federal monitor overseeing city jails Horizon for ongoing “hyper-confrontational conduct” by ACS staff and stated that “the culture of disorder at [Horizon] must be transformed.”

A by the federal monitor on both Horizon and Crossroads is expected by the end of the year.

Reality Check

Marisa Kaufman, an ACS spokesperson, told THE CITY that the agency has been “aggressively recruiting, hiring and training multiple classes of [Youth Development Specialists” to address the staffing issue.

It is also “working to better align the preservice training that YDS receive before they are assigned to a facility to ensure it reflects the full reality of the environment,” as well as providing emotional and mental health support.

The agency is also working with embedded consultants from the National Partnership for Juvenile Services to “help [ACS] improve practice and ensure an even safer environment for youth and staff,” Kaufman explained.

She also added  that “In-person programming occurred throughout the month of September,” that outside service providers were at detention facilities “every day,” providing a variety of programs such as gardening, drama club, urban farming and more, in addition to in-house programming.

But Lisa Salvatore, head of the juvenile defense practice at Brooklyn Defender Services, said the reality for teens behind bars is a different story.

“There is a big difference between ACS’s policies and the lived experiences of young people who are in detention,” she said. “What the young people we represent tell us is that they crave programs and education but are not getting enough of what they need to thrive.”

THE CITY is an independent, nonprofit news outlet dedicated to hard-hitting reporting that serves the people of New York.