The Home for Good (HfG) coalition held a press conference and rally on Saturday, September 16, outside of the University of Minnesota’s Eastcliff Mansion, Governor Tim Walz’s temporary residence while the governor’s mansion undergoes renovations. The coalition, which incorporates activists, families of inmates, and formerly incarcerated individuals, called on Walz to satisfy with them to debate prison staffing levels and reducing Minnesota’s prisoner population through work release and reduced sentences through the Minnesota Rehabilitation and Reinvestment Act. 

“There are currently 1,400 low-risk inmates within the Minnesota [Department of Corrections] being denied work release by the commissioner,” said David Boehnk, one in all the rally’s organizers. “That’s more people than are currently in Stillwater prison today, and that may be a key solution to the staffing crisis.”

Boehnk says reducing the variety of prisoners will lower the variety of staff needed and help alleviate the Department of Corrections’ ongoing staff shortage. 

The HfG rally comes after a piece strike at Oak Park Heights prison last week and two weeks after a lockdown at Stillwater prison in a standoff where inmates refused to return to their cells and demanded higher living conditions, including air-con and cleansing of the power’s water, which inmates allege comprises heavy metals and other toxins. The DOC announced it might be bringing in bottled water for inmates while it tests the power’s drinking water to see whether it is secure.

Melissa Lund of Minnesota Wrongfully Convicted Judicial Reform thought the DOC’s testing actions were only performative. “The DOC is an abuser,” Lund said. 

“They are going to shine up their actions, smile for the cameras and say, ‘See, we’re getting the water tested. See, we’re getting them water bottles. We care about these men.’ But then behind closed doors they strip search the lads and throw them in solitary.”

Some members of HfG jumped the picket fence surrounding Eastcliff to deliver the governor a card that read “Meet with us,” but State Patrol officers stopped the group before they reached the residence’s door. No arrests were made, and HfG’s card was dropped in a garden on the property. 

Novelist and editor Tia Williams got here out to indicate support for the rally and called for the DOC to “free all of our families” that were in prison. “That is just one other example of how, since COVID, Black and Indigenous people, poor people, have been left at midnight in the case of resources,” Williams said. “They’ve been left within the dungeons in the case of us not caring about them.”

Williams said that the protocols for the reason that start of the COVID-19 pandemic often leave inmates stuck of their cells. People must be released. “In the event that they’re not needed, send them home,” Williams said. 

“What we wish is for our members of the family to return home and get to work and give you the option to pay taxes and to give you the option to properly look after their families. The economy’s not doing pretty much as good because it might be, and people are potential laborers that might be entered into the workforce.”