Former inmates lament loss of prison employer and its ‘family’ atmosphere

From left, Mark Milk, Terry Van Zanten and Aaron "Coco" Andrews of Metal Craft Industries. (John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight)

South Dakota Department of Corrections Secretary Kellie Wasko described Metal Craft Industries as a private business exploiting cheap inmate labor.

At least some of the inmates who worked there for decades disagree.

The private business spent more than two decades employing maximum security inmates, paying prevailing wages that allowed them to pay room and board to the state, child support to their families and restitution to crime victims.

Wasko’s concerns about Metal Craft don’t make sense to the former inmate employees who now work for the company on the outside.

Private employers say they were pushed out of state prisons

Long-term inmates helped Metal Craft maintain institutional knowledge and quality control, owner Terry Van Zanten said. But the inmates were offered something to wake up for and be proud of as they stared down a life behind bars.

Those who were able to leave, meanwhile, did so on surer footing than most other parolees.

Aaron “Coco” Andrews used the pay he earned in prison to put a down payment on a house after his 2016 release.

He credits Metal Craft with turning his life around. He got a shot at the job in 2001, back when he was “a s—head” who could barely go a month without a write-up, he said. A former associate warden cut a deal with Andrews: Go four months without a write-up, and you can get a job with Metal Craft and start saving money.

“That’s what he said, and he kept his word,” Andrews said.

Even though more than half of every paycheck went to the state, family support and the crime victims fund, he had around $10,000 in the bank when he left prison 15 years later.

Andrews worked at Metal Craft’s shop outside the prison walls for a while, then spent some time working for other companies to develop other skills.

Eventually, he came back.

“It’s family out here,” Andrews said.

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Van Zanten also talks about employees in family terms. His son and daughter are partners in the business, and he said watching inmates mature and grow as people often felt like parenting. He’d hear about the stresses of incarceration or flare-ups between inmates and correctional officers, or inmates and other inmates.

In January of 2024, the Department of Corrections ordered him to replace his long-term inmate employees with work-release inmates who’d never worked the skilled jobs he needed them to perform. Before long, Van Zanten decided that his struggles with communication and the shifting rules for operation were too severe for him to continue on at the penitentiary’s Jameson Annex in Sioux Falls.

It wasn’t the outcome he’d hoped for when the new security protocols and policy shifts began to interrupt his operations last fall.

He wasn’t opposed to working with lower-security inmates. Van Zanten only ever used the inmates the DOC offered him, he said, and he was willing to make changes. He just needed guidance and transition time, and he needed to keep at least a few experienced employees around to train the newbies.

The DOC wouldn’t allow that. To save the business, he said, he had to say goodbye.

“There were a lot of tears shed that day,” Van Zanten said. “We’re talking about 20 years, and I was never going to see these guys again.”

He has reconnected with a few of them, including Mark Milk.

Unlike Andrews, Milk was serving a life sentence when he started at Metal Craft. Gov. Kristi Noem commuted his manslaughter sentence, however, based on a recommendation from the South Dakota Board of Pardons and Paroles.

The board was swayed by his work ethic and ascension to a trainer’s post at Metal Craft, Milk said, but it wasn’t just that.

“The one thing that really impressed them was that when I had that job, the money I had that I was getting paid every two weeks, I took that and opened my own bank account and I put it in there for my nieces and nephews for college,” Milk said.

Milk and Andrews both said that Metal Craft’s commitment to its employees and the wages explain why maximum security inmates like them – both served decades for manslaughter – were some of the most well-behaved in prison.

“People didn’t mess around out there,” Andrews said. “They had too much respect for the place.”

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