Sioux Falls lawmaker urged corrections secretary to release letter telling state’s version of the story
PIERRE, S.D. A state lawmaker released a letter Thursday from Department of Corrections Secretary Kellie Wasko that addresses allegations of unfairness by a private company that left its prison workshop earlier this year.
The DOC has never granted an interview with Wasko to discuss the exit of Metal Craft Industries, which paid a market wage to inmates in Sioux Falls under the guidelines of a federal program. The business employed inmates for more than two decades.
The letter outlining the DOC’s version of the story wasn’t meant for public consumption. It was offered confidentially Monday to members of the Legislature’s Government Operations and Audit Committee.
Rep. Linda Duba, D-Sioux Falls, who sits on the committee, asked Wasko on Wednesday evening for permission to release the letter to the media and Wasko agreed. Duba sent it Thursday morning.
“This is just to give some clarity and a lot of details,” Duba said.
The letter’s release comes one week after the state Board of Technical Education voted unanimously to endorse the pursuit of a diesel mechanic program for inmates in the space once occupied by Metal Craft Industries.
That program would be run by Southeast Technical College, which already teaches welding to minimum security inmates at its Sioux Falls campus on a daily basis. Wasko argues in the letter that Metal Craft was “putting the safety of our staff and other offenders at risk” by refusing to “modernize” its operations. She goes on to tell lawmakers that the DOC “hopes to have a new program set up soon” through Southeast Tech.
DOC response comes after media spotlight
Several media outlets, including South Dakota Searchlight, have written about the dispute between Metal Craft Industries and the DOC.
Metal Craft’s owner, Terry Van Zanten, said Wasko wanted operational changes too quickly, and that he wasn’t offered enough guidance on how to comply with DOC mandates. The company was forced out, Van Zanten argues.
In the letter released Wednesday, Wasko called that a “very misleading and false narrative,” and accused Van Zanten of slandering the agency by telling it.
She wrote that Metal Craft Industries came under scrutiny after a civilian Metal Craft employee was caught on camera allowing an inmate employee to use a cell phone. A subsequent search of the shop turned up contraband, including a knife, loose drill bits, two iPads, unauthorized snacks and “excess electronics, cooking appliances and other items to which offenders are not allowed to access.”
Metal Craft’s shop was located in the Jameson Annex, which is the prison system’s maximum security facility for male inmates.
The DOC had pushed Van Zanten to work with inmates with shorter sentences, Wasko’s letter said, in order to give them job skills for use outside the prison walls. Most of Van Zanten’s employees were serving life sentences.
Wasko said the company slow-walked changes to its inmate staffing, didn’t take changes to the state’s prison tool control policies seriously and chose to end the partnership rather than comply.
The letter offers new details and a timeline of events, but its narrative aligns broadly with the story Wasko has told to lawmakers in public meetings about the situation.
Van Zanten wanted to use his long-term inmate employees to train new ones, and the letter quotes snippets of an email from him in which he asked to retain some of his “key” inmate employees, even as the DOC moved to reclassify them and move them out of Jameson. Van Zanten wrote in the email that he needed those inmate employees to stay competitive in the market.
“Essentially, MCI was asking for DOC to house offenders in the most restrictive conditions of confinement, even if their classification deemed them less risky, for MCI’s benefit,” Wasko wrote.
Van Zanten said Thursday that he believes Wasko’s letter is meant as cover for an overly rigid approach to change and the failures in communications that he says led to the breakdown of the business relationship.
“We told the truth, and we’re sticking by it,” Van Zanten said. “She’s just pulling things out of her hat at this point.”
Diesel mechanic program planned for vacated space
The DOC aims to refashion the Metal Craft space into an instructional area for inmates.
Currently, inmates on minimum security status who live in a halfway house in Sioux Falls travel to Southeast Tech every day to participate in afternoon sessions of the school’s welding program. The program is jointly funded with the South Dakota Department of Labor.
Over the course of the partnership, more than 50 welders have been certified, according to Ben Valdez, the school’s vice president of academic affairs. Inmate welding students have worked on projects for community organizations, Valdez said, including a series of camera mounts for Howard Wood Field in Sioux Falls that are now used during track and field events.
More than 80% of the program’s graduates have gotten welding jobs upon release, Valdez said.
“Our two new instructors have even taken it up another notch,” Valdez said during a recent visit to the welding program’s workshop. “Instead of just teaching welding, we’re doing a lot of fabrication. Within welding facilities, a lot of times they have to be able to cut, press, shape and redo the welding materials so that they then can actually put them together.”
Inmate students at Southeast Tech are treated “like every other student,” Valdez said, and can participate in on-campus events, including job fairs and a recent visit from television personality and vocational education advocate Mike Rowe.
Pritam Gurung is one of the inmates in the current class of 12 at Southeast Tech. Gurung is looking forward to leaving DOC custody with the skills to land a decent paying job. His family has been disappointed with the repeat drunken driving offenses that landed him in prison over the winter, but “the things that I’m doing with the time that I’ve got in here, they’re happy about that,” Gurung said.
In addition to discussions on a diesel mechanics program, Valdez said there have been preliminary talks on bringing female inmates into programs like medical coding and phlebotomy.
The DOC also offers career and technical education courses in precision machining for male offenders at Mike Durfee State Prison in Springfield through Lake Area Technical College, according to an Oct. 4 news release from the DOC. Offenders from the Rapid City Minimum Center can enroll in a plumbing course at Western Dakota Technical College, the release said.
