Staff shortages in Minnesota prisons are driving a glut in overtime hours for correctional officers, taking away valuable rehabilitative programs for inmates and making the facilities more dangerous for staff and prisoners.
Minnesota's Office of the Legislative Auditor presented the results of a scathing assessment on security in the state's prison system Wednesday, showing how a rise in inmate population has long outpaced staffing levels, hindering safety in Minnesota's 11 prisons. At the same time, the Department of Corrections has failed to create a comprehensive system to track assaults, meaning leadership doesn't fully understand the security problems they face or how to fix them.
"I really feel like we are at an absolute crisis here at the DOC. We are at a breaking point," said Rep. Marion O'Neill, R-Maple Lake, at the audit hearing. "Right now, we've got to stop the bleeding."
"I feel that same sense of emergency," said Paul Schnell, who was appointed as commissioner of corrections in January 2019. "If I could wave a wand and fix this, I would do it in a second."
In 1998, Minnesota prisons incarcerated 5,680 inmates and employed 3,100 full-time staff. In subsequent years, legislators passed a series of tough-on-crime laws that sent more people to prison for offenses such as drunken driving, guns and sex crimes. But the state failed to keep up with staffing levels. Last year, Minnesota counted 9,248 inmates and 3,740 corrections staff members, according to the audit.
To bridge the gap, existing staff have taken on more and more duties. From 2013 to 2019, overtime — much of it mandatory — for correctional officers quadrupled, according to the audit. The shortages have also cut out inmate activities such as therapy, education, jobs and recreation, creating tension in the prisons.
Prisoners now outnumber security staff by more than 4 to 1, and employees frequently work alone with large groups of inmates while exhausted and less alert. The newer, less experienced hires often get stuck taking on the most dangerous and least desirable positions.
Employees don't intervene, and in many cases don't even see, a significant proportion of the violence between prisoners, according to the audit. Instead they find inmates with unexplained injuries, such as a recent case when officers discovered a prisoner with a punctured lung.