Our prison system is in trouble. Neglecting it will be disastrous.

State funding is tight and, with split control in the House and a narrow Democratic margin in the Senate, more money from new taxes is unlikely. The alternative we’re left with is to cut, and that threatens a great many harmful outcomes, most of which we won’t begin to understand until well after budget bills are signed into law. 

The Senate budget, for example, proposed to decouple the state general education formula from inflation, reneging on a 2023 commitment that itself was not enough to bring per pupil funding back to where they were before cuts made in the early 2000s. Reduction of anticipated funding will financially stress school districts, suppress teacher pay, and push up property taxes. 

Similar dynamics will be felt in health and human services, natural resources, and higher education, where tuition is expected to rise by as much as 10% to make up for insufficient state funding. 

Those are high-profile cuts that will receive a lot of public airing, but reduction and underfunding over the next several years threatens wide ranging harms that most of us have not even contemplated. Consider, for instance, the impact on Minnesotans we’ve literally hidden behind walls: Our state prisons are already dangerously underfunded and about to fall even further behind. Prisons aren’t exactly the feel-good cause of our progressive fantasies, and that’s exactly why they make such a useful example of the importance of public investment. 

If we can understand the value of a functional corrections system, then we can start to view public investment in a much more productive light. 

Many policymakers are understandably reluctant to spend money on people that have broken the law when law abiding citizens have so many unmet needs. In tight times, state corrections funding is easily neglected. Unfortunately, that logic leads to costly outcomes and untenable conditions. 

Underfunding doesn’t mean more punishment, it just means more dysfunction. And that’s bad for everyone, as the current condition of our prisons clearly demonstrates.

A 2020 report by the Office of Legislative Auditor recommended closing or replacing facilities in both Stillwater and St. Cloud due to massive deferred maintenance. These facilities, along with one in Shakopee, failed to meet federal standards that require 25 square feet of space per prisoner. Two other facilities lacked sufficient plumbing for the number of inmates they housed. 

Poor conditions like this motivated a peaceful prisoner takeover at Stillwater prison in 2023. Among the grievances were lack of access to showers, poor climate control, and curtailed programming and visiting hours due to staff shortages. A 2025 report on physical maintenance needs confirmed these issues, citing leaking, flooding, dangerously hot interior temperatures, and structural deterioration — all threats to prisoner and staff safety.

Last weekend, I attended an event where a guard from one state facility recounted how his unit suffered increased assaults and staff hospitalizations due to understaffing.

Not surprisingly, DOC has the highest turnover rate of any state agency, which is itself expensive due to the cost of hiring and overtime. More competitive pay would help, but stingy budgets make necessary raises impossible.

This is just one example of how underfunding can become self-reinforcing. Here’s another: Because most prisons have closed their medical units, prisoners in need of health care must now be treated in public hospitals where they require additional around-the-clock supervision from dedicated guards. 

On a larger scale, understaffing regularly leads to reduced programming, which curtails the amount of education, counseling and other activities aimed at shortening sentences and ensuring successful release. 

This status quo leads to poor conditions for prisoners and staff, and to enormous long-term economic and societal harm. Social science research shows that incarceration leads to intergenerational cycles of poverty, violence and antisocial behavior that greatly diminishes personal and community well-being. 

And, of course, we don’t need academics to tell us that our prison system is dysfunctional. In Minnesota, for example, someone with a history in the criminal justice system is 7 to 13 times more likely to experience homelessness and around 20% of all prisoners freed each year become homeless immediately upon release. That comes with a heavy social and fiscal cost.

DOC received a much-needed budgetary increase in 2023, but more is needed if the agency is to keep up with increasing costs and added programs that came along with the money. New investments, like the Minnesota Rehabilitation and Reinvestment Act are aimed at reducing long-term costs by improving rehabilitation outcomes. That’s the right idea, but now the program risks stalling out at the pilot phase due to lack of funding. 

With so much dysfunction, many on the left would like to see prisons scaled down entirely. That is the correct goal, but broader decarceration won’t happen quickly. To get there, we need to reconceptualize prisons not as a retributional system to be managed for the least immediate cost, but as institutions designed to achieve a collective priority — the minimization and correction of violent and destructive illegal behavior. 

That will require reforming an oppressive parole system as well as greater investment in substance abuse rehabilitation, counseling, and more humane facilities to promote independence and successful reintegration. Prisoners participating in work programs should also receive a reasonable wage so that they don’t end sentences in poverty — a common reality ripe for repeat offense.

Other countries do all of this very differently, and now Pennsylvania has begun experimenting with Scandinavian style prisons, which foster rehabilitation and independence by allowing greater autonomy within the facility. With multiple failing facilities, Minnesota could be ripe for an experiment like this. But it requires placing proactive problem-solving above scornful neglect. 

This year’s budget won’t give us the modern prisons that would be safer and more conducive to rehabilitation, but the difference between the good version of this year’s budget and the bad version could be enormous. 

With just $14 million of additional funding for 2026-27 — less than a 1% agency increase, despite inflation well above that — the proposed House budget would result in staffing cuts that would make all of our problems worse. Hopefully, that position is just a figment of multi-phase bargaining (the Senate increase is about $60 million and the governor’s over $100 million), but anything like it would be disastrous for tens of thousands of inmates and workers. 

The answer to all of these troubling tradeoffs, of course, is that we could easily choose a different path. Even a relatively small tax increase could provide substantial revenue to ensure agencies like corrections have the operating adjustments they need. 

The alternative is to allow prison conditions to degrade, staffing to fall, and outcomes — which have been improving — to stagnate or decline. Minnesotans likely would not notice these changes right away, but over time it will result in slower release, less rehabilitation, and more people left lost and dispossessed from their interaction with a dysfunctional criminal justice system. The result will be higher costs and lower quality of life for all of us. 

Minnesota must maintain its long-held commitment to the public investments that support a high quality of life for everyone, even when it’s difficult.