South Dakota loses federal funds for prison rape elimination amid fears of national impact
Educational materials on sexual assault in prisons, produced by the South Dakota Department of Corrections and paid for by federal grant funding. (Photo illustration by John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight)
The South Dakota Department of Corrections has lost access to more than $25,000 in federal funding meant to aid in the investigation and prevention of sexual assaults in prisons and jails.
The state Bureau of Finance and Management publishes a rundown, updated weekly, of dollars lost to the state through Trump administration cuts. The latest list includes a loss of $25,332 in 'strategic support' money for compliance with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act.
The act requires prisons and jails to document sexual assaults behind bars, protect victims who report incidents and ensure adequate safeguards are in place to prevent assaults.
The lost money would have been a second-year award in a two-year grant. The state already received $28,419.
The finance bureau's newest spreadsheet lists $23.7 million in total federal funding lost across various state agencies and projects since the start of the Trump administration.
The DOC says it doesn't actually need the lost federal dollars to comply with the federal law on sexual assaults in prisons. As of this week, the agency hadn't spent all the money from the first grant award.
Corrections spokesman Michael Winder told South Dakota Searchlight that the agency spent about $16,000 from the first year's funding for 'educational literature and training.'
That material included wall posters instructing prisoners on how to report sexual assaults, which listed addresses for anonymous reporting and the number to dial from inmate tablets to report an assault. The department also printed 'no means no' posters, six-step staff procedure cards outlining what to do when an inmate reports a sexual assault, and pamphlets on the rape elimination act for inmates and their friends and family members.
The grant was awarded to help the department comply with the law, and Winder said it now does. He said South Dakota's facilities are 'continuously audited' for compliance with the federal statute. The remaining $12,000 from 2023, he said, will be used 'to provide continued training and advancement for staff who respond, investigate, and provide continued care for victims of sexual violence within the correctional facilities.'
The state penitentiary's most recent federal audit was finalized in January. The report found no deficiencies. Audits of each state correctional facility since 2019, as listed on the department's website, showed no deficiencies.
In 2023, the most recent year for which data are available, there were 22 substantiated sexual assault reports in South Dakota prisons.
That was 22 out of 148 investigations tied to the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The department declined to offer details on the substantiated incidents, citing exemptions in South Dakota open records law for law enforcement records or records that could endanger others, as well as a provision in the act that bars the release of information on individual incidents.
That most recent annual report notes that the department 'began tracking and reporting investigations in a consistent and efficient manner' in 2023.
The loss of the remaining $25,332 for South Dakota was part of the fallout from a decision by the Trump administration to cancel a host of grants related to the Prison Rape Elimination Act Resource Center.
The cuts effectively shut down the resource center for a short period of time. Until the change, the nonprofit organization had dozens of employees, laboring under a collaborative agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice.
Overdose deaths, gang violence draw charges in some — not all — recent prison incidents
Many of them worked to review the audits required of every correctional facility in the U.S. every three years, and served as a resource to connect prisons and jails nationwide with partners who could help them do things like train officers on how to handle sexual assault reports.
A California-based nonprofit called Just Detention International is among the organizations that relied on and worked with the resource center. Its mission is tied specifically to sexual assaults and harassment in correctional settings.
In South Dakota, the group worked with the Rosebud Sioux Tribe to build a compliant sexual assault prevention and reporting framework for a juvenile detention facility. It's also listed as a resource for victims in the most recent penitentiary audit for South Dakota.
Linda McFarlane, Just Detention's executive director, told South Dakota Searchlight that some staff at the resource center have returned since April, when the grants for states and the resource center were rescinded.
All the audits conducted across the U.S. since 2022 remain archived on the resource center website, but McFarlane worries the pared-down staff won't be able to review them. She's also troubled that the funding cuts removed the staff that trained investigators and connected local coordinators with resources.
'Part of the problem was that this message was sent, that PREA is no longer taken seriously,' McFarlane said. 'I think people misunderstood the defunding of the PREA Resource Center to mean the law was no longer in effect. And that is absolutely not true.'
McFarlane was glad to hear that South Dakota intends to continue adhering to the law, but she worries that jailers who may have never taken the law seriously will feel empowered to ignore it.
'We heard from survivors and from currently incarcerated people that this felt like a huge slap in the face, that the government was signaling that they no longer take their safety seriously,' McFarlane said. 'And from within the corrections departments, the people who take it seriously were panicked.'
The former director of the resource center, Dana Shoenberg, posted on LinkedIn that the funding cut had 'scattered' its team into different jobs around the country, but said she hopes they or others continue to work 'to fulfill PREA's promise of eliminating sexual abuse in confinement.'
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