South Dakota Department of Corrections Secretary Kellie Wasko presents to the Legislature’s Joint Appropriations Committee on Jan. 23, 2025, at the Capitol in Pierre. (Makenzie Huber/South Dakota Searchlight)
South Dakota’s beleaguered secretary of corrections has resigned.
Gov. Larry Rhoden told South Dakota Searchlight that Kellie Wasko delivered the letter announcing her Oct. 20 departure on Tuesday, though the letter is dated Sept. 1.
News of the secretary’s resignation after 3½ years on the job came less than a day after a group of 20 lawmakers in the House of Representatives signed a letter calling on Rhoden to “clean up his Department of Corrections” before a Sept. 23 special session. That’s when lawmakers will be asked to endorse construction of a $650 million, 1,500-bed men’s prison in Sioux Falls.
The timing of the lawmaker letter was coincidental and “unfortunate,” Rhoden said.
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“She had made up her mind, and she knew what she wanted to do,” the governor said. “She knew that this wasn’t getting better.”
Rhoden added that only one of the letter’s 20 signatories, Howard Republican Rep. Tim Reisch, had called him to express his concerns about Wasko in the past six months.
“I guarantee you, they all have my cell number,” said Rhoden.
The governor added that he had faith in Wasko in spite of criticisms of her management style and a wave of security incidents and controversies since 2023.
Despite that confidence, Rhoden said he recognizes that Wasko’s resignation will make it easier to convince the Legislature to back the $650 million project.
“You’re always looking for the hurdles that are going to give people a path to ‘no,’ and to remove those hurdles and give them more reasons to say ‘yes,’” Rhoden said.
Letter authors laud resignation
Reisch, the first lawmaker to call for Wasko’s resignation and a former corrections secretary himself, lauded the news as a step forward as the Legislature ponders a replacement for the oldest parts of the state penitentiary in Sioux Falls.
“I just hope it’s a transition to a better way of doing things,” Reisch said.
None of the 20 lawmakers listed on the letter hold leadership positions in the House.
But House Speaker Jon Hansen, the Dell Rapids Republican now running for governor, said Wasko “needs to be fired” on his campaign’s Facebook page Tuesday morning.
House Speaker Pro Tempore Karla Lems, R-Canton, is Hansen’s gubernatorial running mate. She said she wasn’t asked to sign the letter. Even so, she said Wasko’s leadership is “what I think rises to the top” of her list of concerns about an expensive new prison.
Resignation letter lists accomplishments
Wasko, a nurse by training who spent years working in Colorado’s correctional system before coming to South Dakota in 2022 as an appointee of then-Gov. Kristi Noem, wrote that she’d spent the past few months discussing her decision with her family.
She’s leaving “to pursue other opportunities,” the letter says.
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The two-page document has four paragraphs in total, reserving the bulk of its space for 22 bullet points listing “just a handful” of her accomplishments.
Among them are a 43% increase in correctional officer pay and a decrease in staff vacancies, creating a “comprehensive reentry program” for inmates leaving state prisons, curing 300 inmates of Hepatitis C, creating an Office of Inspector General to investigate crime behind the walls and a reduction in escapes.
“I have worked diligently for the last 3½ years to improve the Department of Corrections and I know I am leaving it far better than I found it,” the letter says.
It also points to a change in the DOC’s “insolence” and discipline policy, which was “highly controversial” with previous secretaries and ended the practice of placing inmates in disciplinary segregation for talking back to officers.
“It was necessary, and we have successfully corrected the process,” she wrote, noting that a 2022 operations review recommended housing inmates in “the least restrictive environment necessary to maintain safe and secure facilities.”
Critics: New policies made for unsafe facilities
The letter from lawmakers stopped short of demanding Wasko’s resignation – it doesn’t mention her by name – but Reisch said changes like that are why he’s called for her ouster.
“If inmates know what the rules are and that they’re enforced, the vast majority will comply with them,” Reisch said. “If word gets around that they’re not enforced, that word gets around pretty fast, and security goes by the wayside.”
Reisch said staff assaults are up, based on conversations he’s had with current correctional officers. The DOC’s annual statistical report for 2024 showed assaults on staff at a five-year low, but Reisch said that could be a matter of shifting definitions of assault since Wasko came to lead the agency in 2022.
“A lot of the definitions can change,” said Reisch, who also suggested that some assaults aren’t logged.
Attorney General Marty Jackley told the Dakota Town Hall podcast in mid-February that his office had more than 100 open assault investigations involving inmates.
You’re always looking for the hurdles that are going to give people a path to ‘no,’ and to remove those hurdles and give them more reasons to say ‘yes.’
– Gov. Larry Rhoden, about the Wasko resignation’s potential impact on legislative support for a prison construction project
Corrections spokesman Michael Winder declined to offer the number of staff assaults to occur thus far in 2025, and said the definition of “assault” has not changed since 2022.
Not all lawmakers saw Wasko’s leadership as a sticking point. Sen. Majority Leader Jim Mehlhaff, R-Pierre, scolded the House members for the letter in a Tuesday interview with South Dakota Searchlight, arguing that it was improper to “inject other issues” into a discussion about replacing a prison he called “inhumane” and “a lawsuit waiting to happen.”
Mehlhaff, who served on the Project Prison Reset task force, said Wasko “has been treated more unfairly than any public official in the state,” noting that she came to the job after a scandal resulting in the removal of top DOC officials under accusations of misconduct and nepotism.
“She did not come on to a DOC that was a well-oiled machine,” Mehlhaff said. “It was a disaster.”
Money questions
Each of the House members who signed the letter voted in February for a bill to finalize funding for what would have been an $825 million, 1,500-bed men’s prison in southern Lincoln County.
That effort ultimately failed. In the wake of that failure, Rhoden established a Project Prison Reset task force to build consensus on the need, price and placement of a new facility to ease overcrowding at the state penitentiary in Sioux Falls.
The group voted to back a 1,500-bed facility on undeveloped land in northeastern Sioux Falls, and to cap the price at $650 million.
Resistance to final budget request for new prison ‘a real possibility’ in Pierre
The $175 million distance between the first figure and the second was also cited as a concern in the letter.
Rhoden released a Frequently Asked Questions webpage last week on the prison that claims the prison’s designers were able to hit that budgetary mark, in spite of those designers telling the task force it was “a tall order” at the group’s final meeting in July.
Mortenson recalls being told in February that the state’s $825 million proposal was the lowest number possible for a 1,500-bed prison. On the House floor, Mortenson was among the lawmakers to repeat the DOC’s assertion that delay would inevitably increase the prison’s price.
“The same people in the administration were telling us they’d already found all the cost savings they could six months ago, and we believed them,” Mortenson said. “Now it’s a much different story.”
Rhoden: There are answers
The governor said Tuesday that there are “quantifiable answers” to the lawmakers’ questions. On the cost savings, he said the new design trims the number of buildings from seven to five, and consolidates common areas for inmates.
“We save 150,000 square feet right there,” Rhoden said.
That figure is not on the prison FAQ page, however. On the price drop, the page says “contractors and designers are preparing a specific plan to meet this budget, and more detail will be added when it is available, in early September.”
Rhoden said he intends to hold conference calls with lawmakers in the coming days and weeks to answer their questions in advance of the special session.
“I would really like to see this evolve into a type of deal where it’s almost a formality to vote, that everybody is informed and comfortable enough that they can just go in, have their discussion and vote up or down,” he said.
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Assistant House Minority Leader Marty Overweg, R-New Holland, said there’s a decent chance that lawmakers will be won over – if their questions are answered. Overweg still wants to know why Nebraska is building a prison for millions less than South Dakota, for example, and said the governor’s office has yet to satisfy his curiosity.
The FAQ page says South Dakota’s prison “will be designed and built to last 100 years, with durable materials, modern security, and full programming spaces – unlike other states that cut corners upfront, only to face higher costs later.”
Overweg, echoing a refrain from lawmakers like Reps. Lems and Hansen, sees value in putting the project out for bids again to make sure.
“I don’t think there’s any urgency,” he said. “I think the special session is crazy. There’s no reason we couldn’t do this first thing at the start of the next session” in January.
He also wants assurances that the price lawmakers vote on is the price that will stick. The new women’s prison in Rapid City, currently under construction, came in at a final price of $87 million. Initially, Overweg said, it was pitched at a cost a lot closer to $30 million.
“The taste of that is still in my mouth,” he said.