Q&A: South Dakota’s next attorney general aims to undo criminal justice reforms, just not right away

South Dakota Searchlight · John Hult · September 8, 2026

Fall River and Oglala Lakota County State's Attorney Lance Russell addresses the South Dakota Republican Convention on June 27, 2026, at The Monument events center in Rapid City just prior to winning the party's nomination for attorney general. (Photo by Seth Tupper/South Dakota Searchlight) Lance Russell will be South Dakota’s next attorney general whether you vote for him or not.

At the Republican state convention in June, Russell earned the party’s nomination to seek the job of the state’s top law enforcement official, and its defense attorney when the state is sued.

Attorney general is among the statewide offices in South Dakota whose nominees are chosen by delegates at party conventions, not by voters in primary elections. The current attorney general, Republican Marty Jackley, is running for the U.S. House.

Russell is running unopposed to succeed Jackley in Nov. 3 general election. The South Dakota Democratic Party hasn’t nominated anyone to run for attorney general since 2018.

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Russell, a Hot Springs native and 1999 graduate of the University of South Dakota School of Law, has spent more than half his career as the Fall River County state’s attorney, beginning soon after he passed the bar exam. He’s also the state’s attorney for neighboring Oglala Lakota County, which is part of the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s Pine Ridge Reservation. Russell prosecutes the cases in that county that fall under state jurisdiction.

From 2009-2020, he stepped away from the prosecutor job to serve four terms in the state House of Representatives and two in the state Senate. He was elected state’s attorney for Fall River County again in 2020 and 2024, and will leave two years early to assume the role of attorney general.

Russell bested Austin Hoffman and John Fitzgerald at the state convention with a campaign focused on undoing some of the reforms to criminal justice he opposed during his time in Pierre.

Those reforms, to the adult system in 2013 and the juvenile one in 2015, ushered in drug courts, a presumption of probation for low-level felonies and a host of other policies meant to hold down the state’s prison population without hurting public safety.

Russell argues the reforms haven’t worked for the adult system — South Dakota is building two new prisons in spite of them — and says institutions like the now-defunct boot camp for teens in Custer did a better job helping juveniles change their ways than the alternatives now used for kids who break the law.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ll be the first attorney general since Gordon Mydland, who led the office from 1969 to 1973, to have served in the Legislature. How do you think your years in Pierre will color your approach to the job?

The nice thing is that I have the perspective of the legislator. I understand how they’re perceiving their job, so I can articulate to them in a manner that they hopefully will understand.

The other thing is that I got a front row seat to watch the attorney general’s work in the Legislature. Legislators have a number of ideas. Marty did a really nice job of getting together with the legislators, having a relationship with them. He could talk to them and help them with their legislation and make sure that it wasn’t unconstitutional or illegal in some fashion.

That’s one of the big issues for the attorney general’s staff, to make sure that they have good communication with lawmakers so that we’re not passing legislation that gets us into federal court and gets us enjoined for doing something stupid.

As attorney general, you will have a Missing and Murdered Indigenous People liaison position. What do you see your office doing on the MMIP issue?

They have someone that has quite a bit of experience (in Marlys Big Eagle ), so I’m excited about that. It’s my understanding that we do, in fact, have a robust office that is working with the tribes to a large degree and trying to implement something very close to the Amber Alert (for missing Native Americans). I’m thankful for that, and yes, I will be an advocate for it.

How would you approach tribal relations, and what have you learned by serving as a prosecutor adjacent to the Pine Ridge Reservation?

I feel like I have worked cooperatively over the last 25 years with the Oglala Lakota County commissioners and the tribe, and that we’ve had a pretty good working relationship. So I’m hoping to put that into effect statewide so we don’t get ourselves into trouble and get banned from the tribe.

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I think that, unfortunately, a lot of what happened with (former Gov.) Kristi Noem getting banned from the Indian reservations just had to do with a lot of not understanding the different jurisdictions and what the state’s jurisdiction actually is. Because if you realize that you have limited jurisdiction on the Indian reservation and understand the contours of it, I think it helps you talk to people in a manner that is constructive, respectful and non-threatening. If you just understand your role as the state, I think that helps dramatically.

You opposed criminal justice reform as a lawmaker back in 2013 and 2015, arguing that leaning on community supervision would backfire. You campaigned on the premise that it has. What problems do you see?

The effectiveness of our juvenile justice system between when I started and now is like night and day. It’s just not working. If you talk to people at the schools, you will get a real good education in how destructive it’s been for the school systems to have these delinquents, who are adjudicated as such, essentially being sent right back to school. The schools have had a very difficult time dealing with it.

The system no longer works. We just don’t have the resources we used to have. I remember when I would have kids come into the system that were absolutely defiant to the judges. Then they would spend 60 or 90 days at the boot camp up there in Custer. They would come back, they would stand in front of the judge, and they would stand up straight. They’d look the judge in the eye. They would respond appropriately. Then they’d go back to the high school here in Hot Springs or in Edgemont, and they would graduate. It would be a success story.

But these days, it just seems like we eventually have these kids just dropping out of school. They’re not being given the resources they need. We no longer have the boot camp now. We have to send a lot of the children that need help out of state because we don’t have adequate resources here.

What would you want to see changed during your term as attorney general? Would you want to bring back a boot camp?

Over the next four years, it’s my intention to try and reform the system, but it is going to be an enormous job. It’s not going to happen overnight. I know that the attorney general’s office has been working on legislation, and my intention this first year is to try and implement a lot of the things that Marty’s been working on, not have an ambitious reform package for myself. Give me a year to work to explain the problems to the legislators and to the governor’s office, and to try and build some consensus to bring some legislation in subsequent sessions to try and fix some of the problems.

Quite frankly, that’s the reason I ran for attorney general. My job has become so much more difficult to do since I came back from the Legislature than it was before, and I knew that I couldn’t fix it from Hot Springs.

I’m going to do my best over the next four years to get some reforms that I think make some sense for the people, for the taxpayers and the victims, and quite frankly, for the people that are coming through the system, so they have the tools they need when they’re released to go back into the community and be successful.

Drug courts and other specialty courts are often cited as successful outgrowths of criminal justice reform. Do you see the value in those?

Here in Fall River and Oglala Lakota County, we don’t have any of those courts. My understanding of how they work is all third-hand. I tend to think I just need to be more educated on what they do, because I haven’t had a lot of experience with them.

Do I think that they’re as effective as they were envisioned to be? Probably not. But I need to not be too critical because I haven’t interfaced with it myself personally.

In a smaller jurisdiction that hasn’t gotten a lot of those resources, almost all of my experience has been that (the reforms) have made the work much more difficult for everybody involved in the process.

Is there anything else in particular you’d like people to know as we approach your first term?

Marty Jackley has done a great job as attorney general, as far as I can see. I want to continue a lot of his programs. I do want to tweak the system and make it work better for the locals, but what I will tell you is that at the state level, I think that the Division of Criminal Investigation, the State Crime Lab, the entities that are under the attorney general, have been working very well. Frankly, I don’t feel like I could have a better situation going in.

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