South Dakota State Penitentiary Historic Buildings

About this property

The South Dakota State Penitentiary is a state prison located in South Dakota's largest city, Sioux Falls. The building's industry shop makes several things for the state, including woodwork and license plates. The State Penitentiary also houses South Dakota's death row for men and the state's execution chamber. The South Dakota State Penitentiary is located in northern Sioux Falls, occupying approximately thirty acres. First constructed as a territorial prison in 1881, it became the South Dakota State Penitentiary when South Dakota was granted statehood in 1889. Though a large portion of the original buildings remain, numerous structural changes have occurred over the years. The main Penitentiary facility contains three housing units. The G. Norton Jameson Annex began housing inmates in February 1993. The Jameson Annex contains three housing units within a secure perimeter and a minimum security unit known as Unit C, which is located outside the perimeter fence. Inmate employment within the Penitentiary falls into two basic categories; institutional support and prison industries. Institutional support includes those employed in food service, as clerks for various departments, as cell orderlies and those working in maintenance. Prison Industries consists of upholstery, printing, sign, decal, license plates, carpentry, book bindery, machine shop, Braille unit, garments and data entry. All but the garment and data entry work is done at the Penitentiary. Most of the work is done for government agencies. Inmates are offered literacy, Adult Basic Education and GED classes. The penitentiary was designed by Wallace L. Dow and constructed in 1882. The warden’s residence was completed in 1884. In the 1890s, prisoners quarried stone to build a wall to enclose the prison yard. In 1881, Richard Pettigrew lobbied for and succeeded in getting a federal appropriation to construct the jail in Sioux Falls, which can be seen from the Big Sioux River. On March 6, 1936, a man identifying himself as Claude Carrier, during a visit to his brother Harold, smuggled two revolvers into the penitentiary and held up staff. The pair obtained rifles and a machine gun before leaving with another inmate, Phil Ray, and warden Eugene Reiley as a hostage. After carjacking two women outside the prison, they drove north out of Sioux Falls. They traded gunfire with police twice, first on a side road two miles north of the city, and again on the highway four miles north, where the pursuit ended with the Carrier brothers' surrender. Ray was killed at the scene, and Warden Reiley would die of his wounds before reaching the hospital. A civilian, Berlan Meisel, who was a victim of a second attempted carjacking, would also succumb to a gunshot wound hours after the melee, while his fiancée was wounded in the face. Claude and sheriff's deputy George Collins were seriously wounded, and another civilian lost a finger to a stray bullet. During interrogation three days later, Claude admitted to actually being Floyd Lindberg, a friend of Ray's who posed as the brother of Harold Carrier to gain entry.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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