We received this provocative short paper from Will Cooley, a native of Villard in Pope County, who is a community faculty member at Metropolitan State University and currently resides in Robbinsdale. The views expressed are his own.
We've retained the academic footnote style for the matter cited in the document, rather than linking throughout the article in the usual blog style.
Will Cooley
Guest writer
Experts agree that the “correctional free lunch” is one of the main drivers of American mass incarceration. Criminal justice decisions are made at the county level while states pick up the cost of imprisonment. This provides a perverse incentive for prosecutors and judges to be “tough on crime” without any fiscal consequences.1
Kandiyohi County provides an example. Commissioners are planning an expansion of the county jail and claiming that local taxpayers will not have to fund the project because it will be paid for with revenue from boarding prisoners. Kandiyohi County contracts with the DOC, ICE, and surrounding smaller counties to lodge and transport offenders.2
The Judicial 8th district (which includes Kandiyohi County) has helped drive up Minnesota’s prison population. In 1994, the district convicted 181 offenders of a felony. By 2017, that number reached 492.3 Judges sent 179 people to prison in 2001 and 323 in 2014. In addition, approximately 22 percent of probationers are revoked and imprisoned yearly.4 As with many areas of Minnesota, the confinement rise coincided with a period of increasing racial diversity.5
When counties overfilled prisons, Kandiyohi County benefited with a contract with the DOC worth at least $3 million to warehouse inmates.
Kandiyohi County has long touted its jail as a revenue producer. In 2006, the county administrator boasted that boarding prisoners would mean “a lot of good jobs.” If the jail was a private business, the economic development office “would be chasing us down the street to get us to locate in Kandiyohi County.” The Democratic state senator said boarding provided a “nice cash flow” for the county.6 The county also extracts funds from inmates through a contract with TurnKey Corrections that guarantees 27 percent of revenues from commissary and communication fees.
While the contracts provide a “nice cash flow,” the conditions for boarders do not facilitate rehabilitation and public safety. As the DOC’s own research shows, “warehousing” inmates has criminogenic effects.7 A typical jail has few mental health services, no full-time medical personnel, no access to jobs, and scant programming. Most jails do not have drug treatment programs. Ironically, only well-behaved and low-risk inmates are boarded, which doubly punishes low-level offenders.8
The Kandiyohi County jail is also one of the five Minnesota facilities that has a contract with ICE to hold people on immigration violations. These detainees are often caged on minor charges for indeterminate periods away from their families and communities.9
The Judicial 8th District has social needs that must be addressed outside of the punishment bureaucracy. As the Kandiyohi County board chair noted, the state must act to comprehensively address mental illness. “People who are mentally ill should not be in the jail in the first place.”10 Concerned residents and rural organizations have insisted that imprisoning people, whether citizens or immigrants, will not solve problems – serious investment in community-driven solutions will. Area leaders endeavor to create economic growth through inclusion, but overuse of carceral measures undermines these efforts.11
Governor Walz has pledged that Minnesotans “can expect our administration to use every tool at our disposal to deconstruct generations of systemic racism in our state.”12 The criminogenic warehousing of people in a racially disparate criminal justice system is an example of the perverse incentives fueling mass incarceration and systemic racism. Why should Minnesota taxpayers subsidize the construction of more revenue-generating cells in Kandiyohi County?
Photo: The Kandiyohi County Jail, Erica Dischino /West Central Tribune.
1 W. David Ball, “Defunding State Prisons,” Criminal Law Bulletin 50:5 (2014), 1060-1090; John F. Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration – and How to Achieve Real Reform (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
2 https://www.willmarradio.com/news/kandiyohi-county-board-approves-moving-forward-on-jail-expansion-remodel-project/article_67d8576c-a0dd-11ea-8da3-275128273589.html; https://www.fox9.com/news/ice-detainees-fear-covid-19-in-minnesota-county-jails; https://cms3.revize.com/revize/kandiyohimn/docs/SHERIFF/2016%20Annual%20Report.pdf
3 Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission, “2018 Sentencing Practices,” https://mn.gov/msgc-stat/documents/reports/2018/MSGC2018AnnualSummaryStatistics.pdf
4 Information supplied by Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission
5 https://www.ruralmn.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/State-of-rural-2020-final.pdf
6 https://www.wctrib.com/news/288010-legislation-could-mean-expansion-beds-kandiyohi-county-jail
7https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23774657.2016.1240596
8https://www.startribune.com/state-s-prisoners-decry-aimless-limbo-in-county-jails/371865301/
11 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/opinion/trump-willmar-minnesota.html
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