State prison population expected to shoot up as pandemic court backlog eases

Despite Democrats’ stated goals of reducing the prison population and making the criminal justice system less punitive, the administration of DFL Gov. Tim Walz expects the population of the state’s 10 prisons to grow from 8,000 in 2024 to 9,000 in 2025 — a 12.5% increase. As the court system chips away at a backlog of cases that piled up during the COVID-19 pandemic, the prisons are expected to be near their capacity of 9,600 beds. 

That’s one reason Walz proposed increasing the corrections budget by $414 million during the next two years — a 27% increase — to nearly $1 billion per year.

“It’s sizable,” Corrections Commissioner Paul Schnell acknowledged in an interview. “There’s no doubt.”

Meanwhile, staffing shortages are imperiling inmate and officer safety, lawmakers say. 

Corrections employs 4,300 workers, and it’s 98% funded by state tax dollars — unlike other state agencies that receive more federal funds — and has no significant revenue streams.

The department estimates it needs a $57 million increase just to “keep the lights on”: paying for the cost of staff salary increases and inflation-accelerated costs for food, vendor delivery charges and utilities, Schnell said.

The prison population dropped during the pandemic, prompting a $21 million cut to the corrections budget in 2020. But now, as courts catch up, the prisons are filling to levels not seen in about four years.

David Boehnke, an organizer with the Twin Cities Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, which works with prisoners to change the prison system, said while the budget has “a couple of interesting experiments,” he’s disappointed in what he considers a status quo budget, given Democrats control the Legislature and governorship.

“It’s certainly not a progressive thing to do,” Boehnke said. “We shouldn’t give the prisons and probation giant blank checks without addressing the problems they’re facing.”

Like many industries, the prisons have a staffing crisis, with guards often forced to work overtime.

“Far too often, staff come in for a shift not knowing for sure if they will work eight hours or 16 hours,” Schnell told the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday.

The staffing shortage, combined with faster-than-projected population growth, led to a $12.6 million deficit this fiscal year.

Sen. Heather Gustafson, DFL-Vadnais Heights, proposed a bill (SF2137) that would spend $62 million in 2024 and $95 million in 2025 to hire additional correctional officers, offer recruitment bonuses and increase salaries. She said the prisons are so understaffed that officers can’t always intervene in assaults. Earlier this month, seven corrections officers were injured in incidents at two prisons.

“It is an outrage that we expect them to dutifully perform their tasks, risk their physical safety, and all for comparable wages to a part-time retail job,” Gustafson told the Senate committee.

Corrections officers start at $21 an hour, when they could make $25 an hour at a manufacturing job or $18 an hour working at a car wash, Schnell said.

Mitch Kuhne, a corrections sergeant at the Lino Lakes prison, said after 10 years working for the department, he still takes home less than $1,300 every two weeks.

“This is simply not enough to support my family and (me), especially in light of the danger and risk that myself and my counterpart officers face across the state,” he told the Senate judiciary committee.

Recruitment bonuses attract lots of applicants, but they don’t stay long. In 2021, the department hired 243 corrections officers and retained 96. In 2022, they hired 659 officers and retained 301.

Boehnke questions how the department will be able to handle another 1,000 prisoners. If Walz wants to make a “game-changing investment” in its prisons, Boehnke said the governor should look to shrink the prison population and end mass incarceration. 

“The way we’re doing it now is destroying families… and creating more cycles of violence,” Boehnke said. “It seems like we’re doubling down on the status quo … even when we have a Democratic majority that knows better.”

From prison to home and back again

Minnesota has the sixth lowest incarceration rate, and the sixth highest rate of people on community supervision. By comparison, more than 20,000 people are in prison in Wisconsin, which has a similar population.

The average probation term is longer than the average prison term, which is one reason DFL lawmakers have proposed legislation limiting probation to five years for most felonies, as enacted in 2020 by the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission. The bill would codify the new rules, but also apply the cap retroactively. 

About one-fourth of state prisoners are there because their supervised release or probation was revoked, often because they violated the terms of their release, such as by missing an appointment with their probation officer or failing a drug test.

Two-thirds of people on probation earn less than $20,000 per year, which makes getting to probation and treatment appointments a struggle. As a result, probation is a leading cause of incarceration, according to a new Pew Charitable Trusts report.

After Minnesotans serve two-thirds of their sentences, most are released to serve the remaining one-third in the community, under supervision.

Boehnke said the department isn’t taking significant measures to prevent those people from ending up back in prison.

The governor’s budget includes a $66 million increase in funding for community supervision across the state. The state supervises some people, as do some counties, for which they get a state subsidy. But over the past several decades, counties have picked up a growing share of the costs.

“The state has been woefully behind covering those costs,” Schnell said. “So there’s a day of reckoning here.”

The budget includes $1.6 million to create intervention centers across the state, such as halfway houses, where people could go for community supervision violations instead of prison. They would go there for a shorter time, closer to their families, which criminologists say often leads to better outcomes.

Walz’s budget proposal projects that by creating these regional centers, the number of people sent to prison for technical violations would be cut in half.

Still using fax machines and paper forms

The state prisons system has about 420 outstanding warrants right now for people who violated the terms of their release.

Their 13-member fugitive apprehension unit is responsible for finding and arresting them.

“We want that number to be as low as possible, given the fact that one of the things that people are concerned about is repeat offenders,” Schnell said. “That’s one of the cycles that we need to break.”

The governor’s budget would nearly double the number of agents, expand their authority and establish a special investigations unit, which has had increasing requests for help from short-staffed police agencies. By broadening the unit across the state, local agencies will have more time for policing, the DOC says.

The department also proposes spending about $35 million over the biennium (and $50 million over four years) to modernize its 35-year-old statewide public safety data system.

Schnell said staff routinely use spreadsheets to track data, paper forms for documentation and reports, and fax machines to share critical information — creating potential security risks.

“It’s been long overdue,” he said. “We’ve done little patches and fixes along the way… a million here and a million there.”

This “technology reset” will ensure reliable, accurate information is shared with law enforcement and the courts and give the state the ability to “take advantage of practical use of emerging capabilities around artificial intelligence, biometrics, facility security and safety solutions,” according to the governor’s budget proposal.  

Out of sight, out of mind

The corrections department supports legislation that would allow prisoners to get out of prison earlier and shorten the length of their community supervision if they participate in rehabilitative prison programs.

“One of the goals of our system is to rehabilitate people, and we do a pretty bad job of that,” said the House public safety committee chair, Rep. Kelly Moller, DFL-Shoreview, in an interview. “People don’t want to invest money in that.”

Thirty-eight other states have similar “earned release” policies.

If the bill passes, the prison population will go down, but it would take a couple of years to implement the changes.

Corrections has historically been underfunded in Minnesota, Schnell said. As of 2020, Minnesota spent the lowest proportion of state general funds on corrections, at 2.5%, versus a national average of 6.5%.

Prisons are out of sight, out of mind for most people, Schnell said.

“Behind massive brick walls, massive fencing structures topped with razor wire, the people who live in them and work in them are hidden,” he told lawmakers Wednesday. “In the most basic sense, our prisons house the failures of our society, the unaddressed traumas, where impossible challenges of our government are dumped. Whether it be the failures of our education and child welfare systems, mental health access, economic opportunity disparities, or structural racism, our correction system is left to deal with these challenges and expected to produce better outcomes, often with insufficient resources.”