According to new data from the Prison Policy Initiative, South Dakota keeps 6,500 people locked up each day. That’s an incarceration rate of 824 per 100,000 population.
South Dakota’s incarceration rate exceeds the national rate of 664/100K pop and places us 12th among 34 states that have higher incarceration rates than any other nation:
Throw in parole and probation, and South Dakota ranks 19th in the U.S. for the rate of people under legal punishment. Minnesota ranks 13th: they have a lower incarceration rate and much lower parole rate than South Dakota but a much higher rate of probation.
White folks make up a slim majority of South Dakota’s prison population, although they constitute 81% of the population at large. The percentage of American Indians in our prisons is more than four times their percentage of the general population.
Incarceration rates in South Dakota and nationwide are far higher than they were from 1925 to 1975, although coronavirus appears to have produced the sharpest decline in incarceration rates in recent history:
At peril of making an argument for outhouses, we used get along for decades putting a much smaller fraction of our population behind bars than we do today. Now the cost of putting so many people behind bars is straining the budgets of county governments.
If South Dakotans aren’t willing to pay higher taxes for these stunningly higher incarceration rates, perhaps we need to look back 50 years—or look across our borders to Canada and the UK today—and figure out how we got along without minimum prison sentences, long sentences, and so many sentences.
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