Oak Park Heights has an issue with prison workers unionizing, not because our wages are outrageously low—50 cents to $2.00 per hour—but because it requires corrections staff to work on weekends. As a result, the DOC has been taking away our weekend hours so that they are only one to two hours.
They claim it’s staffing shortage, an age-old excuse. In truth, the staff call in sick on the weekends, so we can’t get our time out of our rooms.
When a fight happens between inmates or a staff assault, they take away our weekends, as if to punish the people who didn’t participate in the incident will teach us some type of lesson. But to be honest they pretend like Oak Park Heights max security prison is violent. I’m sure if you look at the rates of violence in every other max prison in America, Minnesota will rank at the bottom or close.
We told staff we wanted our weekend hours and our 10 p.m. hours out [of our cell] instead of 8 p.m. on Mondays and Fridays, which started during Covid when our time was modified.
I spoke with [Oak Park Heights DOC] on behalf of my peers. They told us we wouldn’t get our weekend time out or our weekday 10 p.m. schedule switched back because apparently that is the time when their staff now got off work. They’re still understaffed on the weekends, yet three different units come out every weekend and only one works as we do.
When we decided not to work, they sent us to our rooms and came in and did a rushed raid on the most outspoken inmates. Me and seven others were rushed out of our cells. And the canine was brought through to search our cells.
During their second search they asked me to do a drug test. The angry Black man must be high. I do the test. It’s negative. They leave it on the table as they search my room again with three to four staff for at least 30 minutes, in hopes it turns positive with time.
They find nothing worth taking me to the segregation unit for (which was the reason for both searches and the drug test). They figure by getting rid of me that this issue will slide under the table, and they can continue to abuse the state’s funding by acting as if they are working full eight-hour shifts, 2 p.m. to 10 p.m.
I was just in administrative segregation for about 45 days. Because I wanted to shower and call my family on the weekend and the prison didn’t like that we spoke up about it. So now I hear their solution is to remove canteen—[concession purchases from inmate accounts]—from Oak Park Heights to another prison.
I’m asking for an investigation into the practice of calling in sick that happens here. I suggest that senators and legislators enact a law or policy that takes away half of their pay for any day we are locked in our cell, where they only have to serve food through the door, while the rest of the day they sit and talk amongst each other.
Let’s get taxpayers their money back. There are many other abuses of authority that I’m sure the Department of Justice would find. But neither the government nor many media outlets help the outcast of society get justice.
We won’t fall into their trap to try and take away the new Minnesota Rehabilitation and Reinvestment Act. The first person who is freed under the bill and gets in trouble will be the DOC’s new poster child. They want us locked up. It’s been part of their agenda.
But let’s expose the flaws in the system and see who’s willing to plug the leaks. That’s progress. While conditions are not like those in [Mississippi’s] Parchman Farm prison documentary, things at Oak Park Heights definitely need to be fixed. Black staff, who haven’t been hired yet, are needed too.
The DOC has never operated with full staffing. The only difference is that now they get paid more to do less. Why are taxpayer dollars going to people who don’t do a full day’s security work?
Jonathan Corbett is a resident of the Oak Park Heights correctional facility.
The Twin Cities Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee is a union working to transform the justice system in MN.
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