No satisfaction in Janklow’s conviction -
A man is still dead at his hands
A column
by Hazel Bonner
I take no joy, or even satisfaction, in the jury conviction, of Bill Janklow in his hometown for second-degree manslaughter. Randy Scott is still dead, and the community lost a good caring person because of the unbelievably irresponsible driving of a person in power.
Janklow always made excuses for his irresponsibility. He was important, he needed to speed, because his time was more important than anyone else’s. And the power structure let him. He made it so speeding tickets did not count against your drivers’ licenses. In so doing he allowed others to continue irresponsible driving.
Whether Janklow gets any prison time from the conviction is really now irrelevant. I was wrong all along so far. I didn’t think he would get charged with a homicide crime. He did. I didn’t think he would get convicted of the homicide crime. He did.
My concern is that South Dakota will always remember Janklow as a person who served this state well politically for 30 years. He was unbelievably arrogant and made decisions based on his ability to broker his power and get his way. He won a bare majority to become this state’s only Representative. The bare majority got what they deserved in that choice – they now have no representative.
Janklow got South Dakota involved in the juvenile boot camp era after other states had given them up as dismal failures – and a 14 year old girl is also dead, because of those choices. Janklow took South Dakota to the top on juvenile incarceration, while continuing to pay at the bottom for elementary and secondary education.
Janklow increased the incarceration of adults – especially minority adults. People who never did the kinds of things the children of influence and affluence do, got prison, while those children went on to become our lawyers, doctors, attorney generals and governors. Janklow, himself, continued breaking the law on the highways, until that fateful day last August when he took a life.
South Dakota closed two colleges during Janklow’s reign. Both have been turned into prisons. South Dakota increased its spending on prisons and jails, while decreasing its spending on higher education facilities. More Indian and black men go to prison each year in South Dakota than graduate from college.
South Dakota prisons have one of the highest suicide rates in the nation. No one seems to care much. Conditions in our super max prison at Jameson A rival that in any supermax in the nation – yet South Dakota claims it has no supermax.
If South Dakota learns anything from the fall of Bill Janklow, is should be that his kind of unrestrained power is not healthy. In the end other people, primarily innocent people, pay the real price, and the system is left less viable because of people like Bill Janklow.
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