• September 27, 1999
• Vol. 52
• No. 12

Little Houses on the Prairie

By Patrick Rogers

South Dakota Gov. Bill Janklow's Plan to Save Small Towns While Putting Prisoners to Work Sparks a Building Boom Behind Bars

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From PEOPLE Magazine

For Alvin and Ruby Peterson, the time had come to move. By 1998, the retired couple's four grown children (and nine grandchildren) rarely spent the night at the family home—a big old five-bedroom, wood-frame house in the blink-and-you'll-miss-it hamlet of Chester, S.Dak. And trudging up and down the stairs was becoming a challenge. "It was a lot to take care of," says Ruby, 78, a home-maker, of the house she had taken over from her mother after Alvin, 84, retired as a hog and cattle farmer in 1977. Yet for the Petersons, the thought of abandoning Chester (pop. 200) for a suitable new home in nearby Sioux Falls was a heartbreaker. "We couldn't leave Chester," says Ruby. "Alvin has to go to the pool hall every day to see his friends!"

In the end, the couple found a way to stay in Chester with the help of good timing, the governor and some state prison inmates. Three years earlier, South Dakota Gov. Bill Janklow had devised a scheme to stem the tide of people like the Petersons leaving small towns like Chester by offering them low-cost houses built by prisoners. According to Janklow, 60, everybody wins: The inmates learn a valuable skill, the elderly can stay put in the towns they love, and shrinking rural communities get a new lease on life. "You have 50 people in town, you can't keep the drugstore open," says the Republican governor. "With 100, you can. It's that simple."

Cheap labor—the prisoners earn only 25 cents an hour—is the key to the program's success. Still, hundreds of inmates have signed up to build the 768-square-foot "governor's houses," enabling the Petersons, for instance, to pay just $20,000 for a two-bedroom wood-frame home that sits on a plot of land at the edge of town, for which they paid an additional $9,000. "No one can believe how nice it is," says Alvin, who sold the couple's old house to a young couple with children, who were interested in relocating close to Chester's elementary school. "You couldn't get a house this cheap any other way."

Janklow's innovative program for prisoners has drawn observers from several states, but he certainly won't ever be mistaken for a bleeding heart. "I'm the toughest, most hard-nosed, right-wing conservative that you've ever met," he insists. Raised in Flandreau, S.Dak., Janklow joined the Marines at 17, and later he earned a law degree. Years ago he noted the use of small prefabricated houses on a South Dakota Sioux reservation. Janklow remembered them decades later when he was searching for solutions to one of his state's most pressing challenges: Almost 60 percent of South Dakotans live in towns with fewer than 5,000 residents, and each year migration to cities near and far threatens the survival of the state's smaller communities. "With these little houses, we make it possible for people to stay in the small towns that make this state such a wonderful place," he says.

At Springfield State Prison, a crowded yard surrounded by chain link and concertina wire resounds with the noise of hammers and power tools as 77 inmates build a row of the diminutive prefabs from the ground up. Carlos Baisden, 38, who worked there while serving 15 months for aggravated assault, says his behind-bars labor was a big help when it came to landing his current job as foreman of a construction crew in the South Dakota town of Vermillion. "I worked on 125 houses at Springfield, so that's a pretty good stepping stone to use when looking for a job," Baisden says. As for his current wage of $12.50 an hour, he adds, "It's quite a step up from 25 cents."

Patrick Rogers
Margaret Nelson in South Dakota

• Contributors:
• Margaret Nelson.