The G. Norton Jameson Annex at the South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls. (John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight)
SIOUX FALLS — There are fewer parolees on the run in South Dakota today than at any point since 2010, the Board of Pardons and Paroles heard Thursday.
In recent years, there have been around 3,600 people on parole supervision in the state at any given time. In early 2022, nearly 500 of them were classified as “absconders,” meaning they’d lost touch with their parole officer.
The current numbers are 3,705 parolees, including 92 absconders.
Parole officers create specialty unit to target parolees in hiding
The low number is a high water mark for parole officers, said Kayla Stucky, assistant director of parole services for the Department of Corrections.
“It’s a big deal,” said Stucky. “We can’t really have a potluck because we’re spread out all over the state, but we’re all pretty excited about it.”
Stucky began working with parolees in 2014, and she told the board she’s never seen fewer than 100 absconders. The last time the number was lower than that was in 2010, she said, and there were about 1,000 fewer total parolees at the time.
The number of absconders who parole agents can reasonably expect to catch is even smaller, Stucky said. About 75% of the absconders are Native American, she said, and about half of those absconders are on reservation land and outside state jurisdiction.
“That leaves roughly 30 absconders that we can apprehend,” Stucky said.
Multiple changes behind drop
There are a host of reasons for the dramatic drop. In late 2022, the state began to pull together a team it would later dub the Absconder Apprehension Unit, a group that collaborates more closely than parole agents had in the past with entities like the Minnehaha County Sheriff’s Office and the U.S. Marshals Service.
In a press release issued five hours after Stucky’s presentation, the Department of Corrections said U.S. Marshals have captured 250 people across the U.S. in the two years since the partnership began.
State officials: Specialty parole unit helps trim fugitive parolee numbers in half
Policy changes have also played a role, Stucky told the board. Agents now use a checklist to determine who qualifies as an absconder based on their overall pattern of behavior. Are they ducking calls? Have they quit their job? Have they recently broken up with their partner and moved out?
“Just because a person misses an office visit doesn’t mean we need to issue an attempt to locate,” Stucky said.
Board Vice Chair Kirsten Aasen homed in on that factor on Thursday. She wanted to know how much of the change could be tied to a change in absconder criteria.
“That’s the easy way to eliminate absconders,” Aasen said. “You just don’t call them that anymore.”
Stucky said the change is less about classification and more about the way agents work with parolees. In the past, parole agents would issue an absconder warrant for people who didn’t show up and couldn’t be found for seven to 14 days. If that person showed up at the office as an absconder or on some other violation, they’d be taken to jail.
Agents are now able to detain parolees in the office, Stucky said, because of a policy change. While detained in an agent’s office, they’ll fill out job applications or work on problem-solving or other life skills exercises. They’re sometimes asked to come back the next day for a few hours. They do, Stucky said, because they’re less worried about getting locked up again.
“It’s so much more beneficial than sending them back to jail,” said Stucky.
Changes to state law
Aasen was pleased to hear that “at least on paper, parole officers are working with” parolees more closely. She also wanted to know about a change to the state’s drug ingestion law. Until July, failed drug tests could draw felony charges. Now, the first two offenses are misdemeanors.
“It always made sense to me,” Aasen said, that parolees who use drugs would hide if they knew they’d fail a drug test.
The law hasn’t been in effect for long enough to tell what difference it might make, Stucky said. But she did proffer that the change might help agents work with people who struggle with addiction and point them in the right direction.
“It gives us a little more leeway, because it’s a misdemeanor,” Stucky said.
Board Chair Myron Rau said he suspects another factor could soon come to influence the makeup of the parole population. A 2024 bill dubbed “Truth in Sentencing” requires people convicted of certain violent crimes to serve between 85% and 100% of their sentence before being eligible for release.
Rau said that’s going to keep certain people off the streets for longer.
“We had to break that news to a guy this week who was in that category,” he said.
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