By Elliot Hughes
Star Tribune
MINNEAPOLIS — The Hennepin County jail is fully staffed for the first time since 2020, and the state of Minnesota has lifted restrictions on its incarcerated population.
That progress is expected to save the county money on overtime staff and the housing of incarcerated people at other jails, which the county has spent more than $2 million on this year. But the Hennepin County jail will remain under additional state oversight due to concerns over well-being checks and living conditions.
“With this latest class, we’ve never had this many [detention] deputies,” Sheriff Dawanna Witt said.
Last October, the Minnesota Department of Corrections (DOC) placed the jail’s license under a conditional status for failing to meet a variety of legal standards, which put those incarcerated at risk. That came after seven people at the jail died between December 2022 and August 2024. All of the deaths involved violations regarding well-being checks, according to the DOC.
The state then ordered the jail to reduce its population to below 600 people, out of a total of 839 beds.
In the year since, the sheriff’s office focused on improving staff numbers, culminating last month when the agency swore-in 99 new detention deputies, bringing the department’s total to around 250.
The jail is now overstaffed by nearly 50 positions — a move made in anticipation of coming retirements, Witt said.
The Hennepin County jail, similar to many incarceration facilities across the country, has struggled to maintain competitive wages, and officials have said the job has become more difficult in recent years as incarcerated people arrive more often with health issues.
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the national correctional workforce dropped 11% in state prisons and 7% in local jails from 2020 through 2023.
Compared to other facilities in the metro area, “nobody’s dealing with the complexity of issues as we are,” Witt said.
Witt teaches criminal justice at Inver Hills Community College and said people were so turned off by the law enforcement profession in recent years that her classroom sizes shrank to single digits. But now, she said, “we’re seeing the pendulum swing back with people going back to school for this.”
Witt said the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office increased its staff numbers with a range of initiatives.
The sheriff’s office didn’t offer across-the-board pay raises, but it has offered higher base pay to new hires. Detention deputies make a minimum of about $62,500 a year, but most new hires this year have started at about $71,200, according to Pafoua Lo, a spokesperson for the agency.
Witt said the office also streamlined the application process, offering access to training for applicants who were still working to obtain minimum qualifications, such as a college degree. The sheriff’s office also reallocated other civilian staff to speed up background checks and stay in touch with applicants as they advanced through the hiring process.
For the first time, the office began offering detention deputies the opportunity to be part of specialty units, such as the dive team and the jail’s first ever police dog unit.
“It’s very important that people know that there’s different opportunities to do things instead of your day-to-day jail work,” Witt said.
Late last year, there was reluctance among the Hennepin County Board to allocate $5.4 million to annex incarcerated people to other facilities for the first six months of 2025. The board voted to do so in the end.
But Lo said the sheriff’s office was able to limit that spending to just $2.4 million through September. That was made possible, she said, by annexing most incarcerated people to the Adult Corrections Facility, a short-term facility meant for convicted adults, in Plymouth, instead of more far-flung destinations.
With full staffing, Witt said the county will now avoid additional annexing costs. She also expects overtime to drop, although she said it’s a “good question” if the jail will avoid overruns.
A study by the sheriff’s office on its overtime usage earlier this year found the agency exceeded its budget by an average of 50% from 2018 through 2023. Jail-related operations accounted for 49% of overtime costs in 2023.
“We will have a dip in overtime, that’s for sure,” Witt said.
Despite the influx of new hires, the jail remains under a conditional license order from the state over issues with well-being checks by detention deputies and a lack of recreational opportunities afforded to some incarcerated people.
Shannon Loehrke, a spokesperson for the state Department of Corrections, said the state still has concerns about jail staff conducting and submitting audits of cell checks performed by detention deputies every week.
The state is also concerned that incarcerated people in City Hall receive recreational opportunities only once or twice a month instead of five days a week.
The Hennepin County jail is split between two buildings in downtown Minneapolis, with 509 beds located on two floors of City Hall and 330 beds in the Public Safety Facility across the street.
Loehrke said the state is still waiting to receive a response from the county about its plan to address the recreational issues and maintain other progress since the state issued the conditional license order.
When asked about the effort to put the state’s remaining concerns to rest, Witt said she has “not been happy with the way that things have been going,” and suggested the state and her agency have different interpretations of the regulations. She did not say when the issues may be put to rest.
“I get it, that’s their job, they’re supposed to hold us accountable,” she said.
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