“Housing for All” Means Everyone: How Policies Can Connect Justice-Impacted People to Homes

By Will Cooley and Mabel Malhotra

The Minnesota Justice Research Center (MNJRC) has been engaged in a multi-year effort to improve our state’s community supervision system focus on safely reintegrating people into the community, reducing revocations, and ensuring public safety. On October 23, 2025, we hosted a roundtable to discuss policies that can create more housing opportunities for Minnesotans on community supervision or otherwise impacted by the criminal legal system.

We know that safe, affordable, and permanent housing is one of the most crucial components to ensuring that people on community supervision are able to thrive and build a life for themselves. But this is often an immense challenge for people leaving prison or jail. In 2023, the Department of Corrections (DOC) reported that nearly 1,000 people exiting prison had no where to go home to — that means 1 in every 5 people released are unhoused when they “come home”. And yet, this is an improvement from previous years when the rate was as high as 25%.

So, on an October evening at the Eastside Freedom Library, we circled up a diverse group of stakeholders including impacted individuals, organizers, DOC representatives, and advocacy professionals and talked about the current landscape, barriers to access, and possible solutions. 

Here’s a breakdown of the current landscape, presented by a representative of the DOC’s Community Stability Program:

Recent Changes from the DOC

• The DOC has recognized housing is a priority and has dedicated staff, supportive housing resources, and rental assistance and to help smooth reentry.

• Within 60 days of release, if an incarcerated person does not have housing a case manager and supervision agent convene to explore all options 

• With this effort, there have been 51 total case consultations since July to ensure individuals both incarcerated and out on supervised release have assistance finding housing. 

• The DOC is improving the quality of transitional housing; agents are inspecting leased residences, doing quality checks, and actually providing feedback on the quality of housing available for justice-impacted individuals.

Reducing Barriers to Housing and Rent

• The DOC has appropriated funds to help individuals on Intensive Supervised Release (ISR), Challenge Incarceration Program (CIP), and supervised release with rental assistance and security deposits.

• Designated Housing Coordinators (HCs) identify and connect individuals with additional community-based resources for ongoing support.

• DOC is launching a Housing Connections Services contract to support individuals who are harder to house which can be due to several reasons including a sex offense, lack of family, victimized family, or financial instability.

• Case managers will work one-on-one to develop housing stability plans and connect individuals to long-term solutions.

Creating Paths to Homeownership

• The DOC partners with Financial Education of Minnesota and HOME Line to provide:

  • Financial literacy classes

  • Tenants’ rights education

  • These programs are offered both in facilities and in the community

    
    

Problems To Address

Here is the list of problems identified by the wide range of stakeholders in the room—from impacted individuals and organizers to DOC representatives and advocacy professionals.

• People assigned to ISR need to have a residency address for release, which can pose an extra challenge with this population due to the nature of the offense (i.e. Level 3s, arson.)

• As our state’s prison population ages, there is a major need for more ADA-accessible housing or housing that can meet these older returning citizens’ medical needs.

• Residency restriction ordinances - perhaps 100 now exist in state

• Extended look-back periods into an individual’s criminal history block many housing options for people with criminal records

• Low quality transitional housing

• Access to transportation - housing only helps if people can access jobs and services. Especially in Greater Minnesota

• Too much of the housing burden is falling on Ramsey and Hennepin

• Culture of exclusion: Landlords often have misconceptions and fears about legality of renting to people with criminal records

• Some larger property management firms have strict bars on renting to people with criminal records but will still take application fees from these folks

• Inadequate financial literacy training while incarcerated - especially on the path to homeownership

• Inadequate life skills training while incarcerated - even in basics like cooking and cleaning

• Too many unsafe housing placements for women

Solutions

The group came up with the following solutions to address the problems above.

• Legal challenges to residency restriction ordinances

• Empower the impacted community to find and provide housing solutions - more unrestricted funds to organizations that are run by and/or serving the communities most impacted

• Need to build stronger relationships at the municipal level because policy changes are more likely in cities than statewide

• Higher wages while incarcerated will lead to better housing outcomes upon release

• Pass legislation that combines Fair Chance Housing with Protected Class Standing to open up more options - See New Orleans for an example

• Adequate emergency transition assistance

• Better education around downpayment assistance and other paths to homeownership

• Avoid concentrating impacted population in certain areas or housing developments

• Condominiums also a step toward financial empowerment

While Minnesota has made progress in addressing housing barriers for justice-impacted individuals, and we see effective efforts from the DOC, we cannot expect a state agency to solve all the problems. This conversation made it clear that people across sectors will need to join together to reduce systemic barriers and create long-term, increased access to housing for these community members. Because we know that stable housing is a foundation upon which individuals can safely transition back into society, and, in turn, be thriving neighbors in their communities.

Curious about our Transforming Community Supervision project? Head to mnjrc.org/reports to read our one-pagers and visit bit.ly/CSreforms to explore our online tracking of 2023 community supervision reforms and the barriers faced by this population.