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Daugaard, Gilbertson and legislative leaders recommended expanding drug and alcohol courts, changing some sentencing laws, putting more nonviolent offenders on probation and allowing released inmates to get off parole earlier if they behave themselves.
• The panel's report said South Dakota's adult prison population has grown from fewer than 550 inmates in 1977 to more than 3,600 now. Unless changes are made, the state will gain another 900 adult inmates in the next decade, requiring construction of a new men's prison and new women's prison, the report said.
• Gilbertson said South Dakota was the only state without a drug court until one was started in the northern Black Hills more than five years ago. That first program was expanded to a larger area in western South Dakota, and drug and alcohol courts were later added in Pierre and Sioux Falls. With money provided by the Legislature, a new alcohol court was opened last year in Aberdeen and a new drug court started last week in Yankton.
• With 41 graduates and 62 current participants in drug and alcohol courts, the programs have treated 103 people who otherwise would have gone to prison, Gilbertson said. Of the 41 people who had successfully completed treatment in drug and alcohol courts as of July, five later committed new felonies and three now face felony charges, he said.
• "We now have sufficient experience with these types of programs to consider the possibility of establishing them in every city in South Dakota that wants them and is large enough to provide support services, such as counseling, to make the local program successful," Gilbertson said.
• The establishment of more drug and alcohol courts should help the state avoid building more prisons while giving offenders a chance to stay out of prison, overcome their addictions and support their families, he said.
• "I was raised by a minister and a nurse. What would have been my fate if I had instead been raised by two meth addicts who could not shake that addiction? The fate of present and future South Dakotans hangs in the balance under the same dynamic," Gilbertson said.
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• SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) -- Police in three South Dakota cities are investigating separate homicides that occurred in the past week -- a statistical anomaly in a state that typically sees about 20 slayings a year.
• The investigations are ongoing in three cities: Sioux Falls, Rapid City and

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