Vehicles fill the parking lot of South Dakota's Rapid City Correctional Facility, a women's prison, on Oct. 1, 2026. The complex includes multiple additional structures behind the main building. (Photo by Seth Tupper/South Dakota Searchlight)
South Dakota’s recently opened women’s prison in Rapid City held 79 women at the end of September, the first month the state began to move them there from the women’s prison campus in Pierre.
Overcrowding in the buildings at the older women’s prison spurred the construction of the $87 million Rapid City complex. For years, the state has paid Hughes County to house some female state prison inmates at the jail in Pierre and held hundreds of women in a minimum security unit that state engineers have deemed unfit for human habitation.
The new women’s prison on the state’s western side has 288 beds. In addition to standard housing units, the campus has facilities for chemical dependency treatment and for a mother-baby program that lets qualifying women live in a home-like environment with their newborn children.
Department of Corrections spokesperson Michael Winder said its population of 79 will grow as its operations ramp up.
On July 10, the date of a ribbon cutting for the prison, Winder told South Dakota Searchlight that inmates would start to move in “beginning next month,” but the first inmates didn’t arrive until September.
As of Thursday, 466 women remained in prison custody in secure facilities Pierre, Winder said in an email. There were 64 held off-site at the Hughes County Jail and 208 in the minimum security unit, with the remaining people in secure detention housed in the main prison unit.
Beyond the women in secure facilities, the total population of women in state prison custody includes some who live in community facilities, such as halfway houses.
Corrections Secretary Nick Lamb told lawmakers in February that the minimum unit is “not suited for occupancy,” according to multiple assessments across multiple years, and has “structural deficiencies.”
Lamb’s remarks came in support of a bill to set aside $682,825 to demolish the building, which lawmakers passed and Gov. Larry Rhoden signed into law.
All maintenance work on the building ceased once lawmakers approved funding for the new Rapid City prison in 2023, Lamb said in February, and the demolition would be needed because the building will “continue to degrade and pose life safety concerns.”
The women in the minimum unit would be transferred to Rapid City “later this summer,” Lamb told lawmakers.
Winder told South Dakota Searchlight that “there have been no substantial maintenance projects” at the minimum unit since Lamb said that.
The number of South Dakotans in prison systemwide has risen by hundreds since spring. A policy change announced this spring by Gov. Larry Rhoden makes it easier to bring paroled inmates back to prison for breaking the rules of their supervision agreements after early release. The number of parolees in custody spiked shortly after the announcement.
Inmates are also being denied early release at a higher rate.
In February, the total inmate population was 3,720. Of those, 580 were women.
At the end of August — the most recent population count available when this story was published — there were 4,049 inmates in custody. Of those, 632 were women. There were eight more women in the minimum unit on Aug. 31 than there are today.
In response to a question about whether the minimum unit in Pierre would remain in service now that the Rapid City facility is open, Winder said the Department of Corrections intends to demolish the building in accordance with the Legislature’s decision.
The timeline for removal is not set, however, and will take place when the unit “is no longer needed,” Winder said.
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Courtesy of South Dakota Searchlight
