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: Lawbeat

Tracking the "Janklow 36" in South Dakota

By Mark Obbie

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Are early prison release programs safe? That's the question that the Sioux Falls, S.D., Argus Leader assigned 10 reporters to answer by tracing what happened to 36 South Dakota prison inmates released en masse 22 years ago -- the so-called "Janklow 36," named for the governor who commuted the sentences. The paper explains:

The germ for the "Janklow 36" series emerged as a reporter was scanning microfilm copies of the Argus Leader from 1986 while doing research on another topic.A story about Gov. Bill Janklow releasing a group of inmates - telling them never to return to South Dakota - caught his eye. At the time, the early release of inmates was a discussion beginning in other states that were struggling with bloated corrections budgets and prison populations. It might be good to see how that option worked in South Dakota, he thought, and what happened to those prisoners.

Led by reporters Steve Young and Matthew Gruchow, the paper reported last Sunday that the governor's action endangered South Dakotans and others because so many of the inmates committed new crimes, including a rape. How many were recidivists? The paper doesn't make that fact easy to find, though in part that's tied to another key finding of the reporting: the state's threat to the inmates to leave the state and sin no more was a "big bluff," because it then had no system to track the inmates and enforce the rules.It's a worthy project, providing a database on each of the 36 former inmates (some of whom gone on to be productive citizens, by the way) and multiple sidebars on the inmates, their victims, and the policy implications of early release in South Dakota and elsewhere.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on May 03, 2008 (boomark / email).