Warden’s office building at the South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls, SD (John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight)
By: John Hult
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (South Dakota Searchlight) – The South Dakota Department of Corrections has replaced the penitentiary warden who resigned last fall after eight months of cascading controversies at the Sioux Falls facility.
Joseph Roemmich, most recently the warden of the Cibola County Correctional Center in Milan, New Mexico, will begin his service in South Dakota June 24.
“Joseph has extensive experience working in the corrections field in a variety of correctional and detention settings,” Secretary of Corrections Kellie Wasko said in a press release. “His work in all areas of security operations as a warden, assistant warden, chief of security, investigator, and officer will be valuable as he helps our corrections staff develop and incorporate modern correctional practices.”
Roemmich has been warden of the Milan facility for a little over a year. The jail is operated by CoreCivic, the for-profit company formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America. The company website says Roemmich joined the CoreCivic after several years serving in law enforcement in California.
The site says the company is “the nation’s largest owner of partnership correctional, detention and residential reentry facilities, and one of the largest prison operators in the United States.”
Milan is a village in western New Mexico with a population of about 2,500 people, located about 80 miles west of Albuquerque. The CoreCivic website says the Milan jail’s main customers are the U.S. Marshals Service, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Cibola County.
South Dakota DOC’s press release on Roemmich’s hiring says that in addition to his correctional service, he has 11 years of law enforcement experience.
“I look forward to working with penitentiary staff to help positively affect the safety and security of the staff, our offenders, and the people of South Dakota,” Roemmich said in the release.
DOC Director of Prison Operations Amber Pirraglia had been serving as interim warden of the penitentiary since the departure of Teresa Bittinger.
Bittinger resigned near the end of a troubled year for the facility in Sioux Falls. March 2024 saw two rounds of unrest at the penitentiary, which followed the temporary shutdown of tablet-based communications between inmates and their families for an investigation the corrections department has never fully explained. Former Gov. Kristi Noem, now head of ICE for the Trump administration, said at the time that inmates had been using their tablets for “nefarious purposes.”
Just before her departure, Bittinger oversaw a lockdown that lasted more than a month and saw prison officials tear down multiple sweat lodges on the prison grounds, a move that drew scrutiny from Oglala Sioux Tribal President Frank Star Comes Out.
Bittinger’s tenure also coincided with the controversial loss of Metal Craft Industries, a private company that spent more than 20 years employing maximum security inmates at a metal fabrication shop inside the penitentiary’s Jameson Annex. The company’s owners say they were forced out in spite of serving to better the lives of inmates by paying market wages – one of its former inmate employees paid off his restitution and had enough in the bank to put a down payment on a home upon his release – and by serving customers across the region.
When asked about the situation by lawmakers in multiple hearings last year, DOC Secretary Wasko said the company had taken advantage of cheap inmate labor and accused Metal Craft of covering up contraband.
Bittinger, who resigned one day after a closed-door meeting with lawmakers, was the third penitentiary warden in fewer than three years. Former DOC administrator Doug Clark served as interim warden in 2021 before the state hired Dan Sullivan, who served less than two years before being replaced by Bittinger, who began as an interim warden and took the permanent position in April 2023.
The leaders began to rotate through after a Noem-initiated shakeup in 2021 led to the ouster of several long-serving prison administrators, including then-warden Darin Young.
Bittinger had served as warden of the entire penitentiary complex. Upon her departure, Sec. Wasko told the public she intended to hire separate wardens for the penitentiary and the Jamison Annex. The DOC has yet to name a Jameson warden.
A prison construction workgroup voted in April to replace the penitentiary, which was built in 1881, but not the Jameson Annex, a separate building erected in the 1990s.
The group voted this week in Pierre to ditch the original site for that replacement, in rural Lincoln County near Harrisburg, to cap construction costs for a replacement prison at $600 million, and to study the feasibility of sites near Worthing, Mitchell, and on land near Sioux Falls already owned by the DOC.
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