Minnesota's prison miracle

Just before Christmas last year, I went to visit Minnesota where my friend Erik Skon, the former assistant commissioner for prisons in the state, was retiring, and about whom I had to give a speech. As a former prison governor and as a criminologist, I had visited Minnesota several times before, most regularly to view Oak Park Heights, the state's extraordinary "SuperMax" prison, which celebrated its 25th birthday in 2007, and which remains the best example that I can cite about how to run a jail that is secure, safe, and, above all, decent.

Minnesota also remains a state that - despite some recent changes - bucks the nationwide trend for hyper-incarceration, and actually saw a fall in the number of people being sent to its jails between 2005 and 2006. The state currently locks up just over 9,000 people, out of a total state population of just under five million people. Some measure of just how remarkable all of this is can be gleaned from the fact that Minnesota's nearest neighbour - Wisconsin - saw their prison population increase by over 3% during the same period to 23,431, even though they also have around five million people living in their state. Indeed, Wisconsin is so regularly short of prison accommodation that they buy space in Minnesota's jails.

This "Minnesota miracle" is now so well known that I was following in some well-trodden tracks - so much so that I am surprised easyJet hasn't set up a regular route between London and Minneapolis for all the prison administrators and politicians who regularly go there to try and learn how Minnesota runs its jails.

Most notably, Lord Carter of Coles visited the state - even if his most recent review didn't seem to take too many of the state's messages to heart - and I wonder if there isn't also a case for employing a "three strikes rule" on Carter. After all, this was merely his latest prisons review, which recommended the construction of three "titan" prisons, capable of holding 2,500 prisoners each to cope with the predicted rise in prison numbers to just under 100,000. This despite the fact that in his last review only three years ago he "saw no reason" why the prison population should go over 80,000.

Of course, many people have tried to explain the Minnesota prisons miracle, and so a range of theories have been put forward as to why the state always seems to have low prison numbers. Inevitably, these theories usually come back to "the Minnesotan temperament", given that the state was settled by large numbers of people with a Scandinavian background, which has inevitably had an impact on the state's political debate. This might or might not be true - the state has routinely been a Democratic "shoe-in", but, on the other hand, it did elect Jesse "The Body" Ventura as state governor, and Minnesotans are as regularly worried as any other Americans about crime, and how best to deal with offenders.

So, in between getting anxious about what I was going to say about Erik, I asked various state personnel why their prison population was so low, and what lessons we could learn in Britain about how to keep our prison numbers below 100,000. In all, I asked about 10 different people their views, and by far the most common answer was: "we put in jail those people we are frightened of, not those that we are mad at."

Now, this was clearly a "cocktail party" answer - designed to quickly express a complex issue in a memorable way, and when a more detailed answer was not really expected - and I have to say that it was impressive. It impressed me for two reasons. First, and leaving aside those obvious objections that some people that you are "mad at" can also be "frightening", this answer allowed me to catch a glimpse of how different offences could be dealt with in the state in different ways, and without always resorting to imprisonment. It was an answer that implied both "toughness" when the state needed to be tough, but also how other penalties could be used when these were more appropriate.

But most of all, I was impressed because here was a group of prison personnel who collectively knew how to explain their work and justify their business. This was not just a case of them being "on message", but also about a real pride that they seemed to take in what they were doing.

I've since thought about this answer a lot, and wondered what "cocktail party" answer a comparable group of British prison personnel might give in similar circumstances to justify their own work in HM Prison Service, the Scottish Prison Service, or the Northern Ireland Prison Service. I can't speak for the Scottish or the Northern Irish, but in a week when we have seen a 37% increase announced in the numbers of people who have committed suicide in English and Welsh jails in 2007, and when plans have already been put in place to manage even greater numbers of people going inside, might I suggest: "we are the inevitable consequence of imprisoning those we are frightened of, mad at, don't like, and can't think of anything else to do with."