South Dakota’s likely next attorney general, Lance Russell, is signaling that changes could be coming to the state’s criminal and juvenile justice systems.
Russell, the Fall River and Oglala Lakota County state’s attorney and the unopposed Republican nominee for attorney general, told South Dakota Searchlight that he believes major criminal justice reforms adopted in 2013 and juvenile reforms enacted in 2015 have not worked as intended. He campaigned on revisiting portions of those policies.
Russell raises legitimate concerns about limited resources, difficult supervision environments and young people who need more support than many communities can currently provide. But some of the conclusions he draws from those problems are less certain than the problems themselves.
Does building more prisons prove reform failed?
Russell points to South Dakota’s construction of new prisons as evidence that the adult reforms did not deliver what supporters promised. The 2013 Public Safety Improvement Act was intended to reserve prison space for more serious offenders, strengthen community supervision and treatment, and slow projected prison growth.
The fact that South Dakota is again expanding prison capacity is important. But prison construction by itself does not explain why the prison population grew.
Before the 2013 reforms, state analysis found that a large share of prison admissions involved nonviolent offenses and that parole violators occupied a substantial portion of prison beds. Those findings were central to the state’s decision to emphasize supervision and treatment rather than simply adding prison capacity.
That history means a present-day evaluation has to separate several different populations: people entering prison for serious new crimes, people incarcerated for lower-level offenses, people returned on parole violations, and people whose supervision failed amid treatment, housing, transportation or employment instability.
Without that breakdown, a new prison proves that South Dakota needs more beds under its current practices. It does not, by itself, prove which specific reform caused that need.
The juvenile argument deserves the same careful distinction
Russell is especially critical of the state’s juvenile justice changes. In the Searchlight interview, he recalled young people who were once sent for 60 or 90 days to the former boot camp in Custer. He described some returning to court more disciplined, showing greater respect for the judge and later graduating from school.
Those experiences are worth hearing. They are also anecdotal evidence, not a statewide outcome evaluation.
A young person standing straighter, making eye contact or responding more respectfully may show that a highly structured environment changed courtroom behavior. Those observations do not by themselves establish whether the intervention reduced later offending, improved behavioral health, strengthened family stability or produced better long-term educational outcomes.
South Dakota’s own early reports on the juvenile reforms complicate the picture. The state reported that before reform, seven in ten juveniles committed to the Department of Corrections in 2013 had been sent there for misdemeanors, probation violations or status offenses. State reporting after implementation showed sharp declines in new commitments and recommitments, along with high completion rates for diversion and probation.
Russell may be closest to a deeper problem when he says South Dakota no longer has adequate resources for some young people.
If the state reduced unnecessary institutional placements but failed to build enough behavioral-health care, family interventions, school support, treatment providers and rural community services, then the problem may not be community-based rehabilitation itself. The problem may be incomplete implementation.
Russell acknowledges an important gap on specialty courts
Russell was notably candid when asked about drug courts and other specialty courts. He said Fall River and Oglala Lakota counties do not have those courts and that much of his understanding of them is third-hand. He also said he needs to learn more about how they operate.
That willingness to acknowledge limited experience is important.
At the same time, Russell suggested that specialty courts may not have been as effective as originally envisioned. That conclusion deserves caution until the programs are evaluated by outcomes such as recidivism, treatment completion, employment, housing stability, costs and successful completion of supervision.
The effectiveness of a reform should not be measured primarily by whether it makes prosecution easier or harder.
Tribal relations may be an area of meaningful difference
Russell’s comments concerning tribal governments deserve separate attention.
As a prosecutor working in Oglala Lakota County, Russell said state officials need to understand that state jurisdiction on reservations is limited and that recognizing those boundaries can lead to more respectful and constructive relationships with tribal governments.
That is significant in a state where relations between tribal nations and state government have often been strained.
Russell also expressed support for the Attorney General’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons liaison and efforts to improve the state’s response to missing Native people.
The measure of that commitment will be operational: how quickly searches begin, which agency owns a case, how tribal, state and federal authorities coordinate, how families are kept informed and what happens when jurisdictional gaps leave a case unresolved.
Change is coming slowly—and much of the first year sounds like continuity
Although Russell campaigned on revisiting criminal justice reform, he does not appear ready to dramatically reshape the Attorney General’s Office immediately.
He told Searchlight that his first year would largely involve learning, working with lawmakers and continuing initiatives already underway under Attorney General Marty Jackley. He said he does not intend to begin with an ambitious reform package of his own.
Russell also praised the current work of the Division of Criminal Investigation and State Crime Lab and said he intends to continue many existing programs.
That sounds more like institutional continuity than immediate transformation.
Longer term, however, Russell clearly intends to revisit portions of South Dakota’s adult and juvenile justice reforms. Before those policies are reversed, the state has an opportunity to ask a more precise set of questions.
If a person returns to prison after committing a serious new crime, that tells policymakers one thing.
If another person returns because of supervision violations tied to untreated addiction, unstable housing, transportation barriers or other conditions that could have been addressed in the community, that tells policymakers something different.
The same distinction applies to juveniles. The deeper measure of success is not simply whether a young person displays obedience in court. It is whether that young person remains in school, avoids future system involvement, receives effective treatment, develops stable relationships and has a realistic path into adulthood.
Russell has said he wants people coming through the justice system to have the tools they need to return to their communities and succeed.
That goal creates a useful standard by which his future proposals can be judged.
Before South Dakota reverses more than a decade of criminal justice policy, it should determine whether the evidence supports changing the reforms—or whether the deeper problem is that the state never fully built the community infrastructure those reforms required.