The Promises and Perils of Powerful Practice Inside Prisons
- Katie Remington
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
“The system is broken, but we’re doing a good job.”
By Dr. Katie Remington Cunningham
This blog is a reflection that represents my own views and perspectives on the conversations that occurred with corrections staff and community members over the course of three days, from 9/22/25 to 9/24/25.
In late September, some of my colleagues and I at the MNJRC were invited to co-host an international visitor on his whirlwind tour of correctional facilities and stakeholder meetings. The invitation was especially interesting because the visitor was Thomas Horton, Head of Community Justice at His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) in the United Kingdom.
HMPPS is an executive agency of the UK’s Ministry of Justice (I kept calling it the Ministry of Magic by accident, which accurately characterizes the excitement we Minnesotans felt receiving a British bureaucrat!). Tom was touring the United States as part of a Churchill Fellowship to explore and learn from other countries around the world about possibilities for change. Tom centered his visit to the United States around a few critical questions:
How do we fill the “gap” between our correctional system and the community?
Where should the system lean in more and do better?
Where should the system step back more and allow the community to lead?
The trip was stewarded by Jay Lindgren, who describes himself as a “recovering bureaucrat.” Jay has designed and administered youth and adult corrections services in three states and knows the frustrations and rewards of supporting people during incarceration and when reentering their communities.
We traveled together from carceral system spaces to community spaces. Over the course of three days, we visited three locked facilities, two Department of Corrections offices, two informal community-based social change spaces, and one formal community-based organization.
MNJRC Team Members with Tom Horton, Jay Lindgren, and Redwing Correctional Facility Staff during Tom's visit
We started at the Juvenile Detention Center in Ramsey County, meeting with system actors and community leaders; then on to the Department of Corrections Reentry Services, where we met with staff working on community initiatives; and we closed out the first day with a restorative circle with The Circle of Peace Movement (TCOPM). The following day, we drove down to the Minnesota Correctional Facility - Redwing to meet with the Warden and a few staff members and to tour the juvenile facility, and then spent the afternoon at George Floyd Square in Minneapolis. On the last day, we drove down to the Minnesota Correctional Facility - Faribault to meet with staff and community partners working in the prison, then back up to the Twin Cities to meet with Grant Duwe, the Director of Research at the DOC, and finally back to the community to visit and meet with staff at Ujamaa Place in St. Paul. Moving from prisons to community spaces, we dug into Tom’s questions.
As a community-centered research organization dedicated to transforming our criminal legal system, we grapple with many of these same questions. We were grateful for the opportunity to document the process of sitting down with a wide range of committed Minnesotans to both better understand current efforts to address this “gap” between corrections institutions and the community and to explore where barriers were preventing us from making sustainable change.
The conversations in each of these places were rich with hope, passion, and commitment from those working with and serving currently and formerly incarcerated young people and adults.
And yet, I couldn’t help but feel a strong dissonance, nodding along enthusiastically as I heard creative ideas and powerful moral convictions from people who are part of a system that puts human beings in cages.
Tom dug in with tough questions for system actors and community members while also leaning back to just listen, all in an attempt to clarify what he called at one point the “murky area” between communities and institutions. It seems at times some folks wondered whether that gap should even be “filled” or instead left as a liminal space, an important barrier, creating necessary boundaries around institutions and communities. I walked away from the three days with clarity about the importance of clarifying responsibility and assessing the impact of powerful practice.
Whose Responsibility Is It, Anyway?
First, if we want to work in the space between institutions and the community, we must discuss responsibility. Whose responsibility is it to fill that gap, to ensure returning citizens have a safe place to live, or to support families with a loved one in jail? Who needs to educate and be educated on the work happening in each space?
Several of the conversations over the course of the three days centered around the work that is happening both in the institutions and in community spaces. In fact, we had the chance to witness some of the consequential work - the power of a single young person’s voice defining justice as simply “fairness” in the circle of peace, the pride of a DOC staff member who is fighting “prison politics” and working on a new living unit focused on “humanity,” the same staff member that spent decades telling their own children they worked at a movie theater instead of a prison.
And alongside this work, we witnessed the desire for recognition and a better understanding of the complexity of correctional spaces. As one DOC staff member said, “If more people could see the work we're doing here, they wouldn’t hate us as much.” Recognition is only the first step, but a critical one in creating relationships. If community members want to understand and change systems, they have to be proximate to them. If system actors want community members to trust them, they have to be proximate to the community.
At the MNJRC, we believe it is our responsibility not just to recognize the work and the individuals who are making meaning despite horrible circumstances, but to examine and evaluate the impact of the work. We work as bridge builders and offer an invitation for both the system and community to step into the responsibility of better understanding one another and asking hard questions about actual impact. If “the system is broken, but we’re doing a good job” - as one DOC staff member put it during a meeting - we certainly aren’t doing enough. Community-centered research, like the work we do at the MNJRC, can bring about meaningful system transformation by holding us each responsible for increased understanding and increased participation in necessary change.
The question of responsibility is not just about knowing and understanding but about doing. Who, in the quest for a safe and just society, holds the responsibility for meeting people’s needs?
Over the course of the three days, we had conversations with different staff across the DOC who were grappling with how much the system should provide endless services or whether it should instead “do a better job of getting out of the direct service business.” As one DOC staff member noted, “It should not be up to corrections to find housing, parenting classes, substance use treatment, and the whole lot of it.” On a different day in a different place, a community leader asked a similar question from a different vantage point, “Wouldn’t it be better,” they wondered, “if people could be supported in their community instead of institutionalized? Given treatment, social services, and care?”
The kinds of supports that people need while inside facilities, when they transition from being incarcerated, and even instead of being incarcerated, are significant. Stable and safe housing, mental and physical health care and treatment, and financial support require considerable resources and infrastructure. But again, who is responsible for filling the space where the system meets communities?
Across the World, a Similar Question
In our very first meeting, Jay encouraged Tom to tell “the story of Japan’s probation system.” Probation efforts are, in many ways, the corrections system’s approach to filling the gap between systems and communities. Tom explained that he learned from his travels to Japan about the Hogoshi, 47,000 volunteers in Japan who serve as the main infrastructure for probationary supervision. The Hogoshi invite people on probation into their own homes. They meet, have tea, and discuss the progress of the person on probation - things that are working or not, challenges, milestones - and then the Hogoshi reports back to the corrections institution in Japan. The approach is personalized. And it’s entirely voluntary and community-based.
This example was lifted up several times in a really optimistic way - look at what Japan does! Community members volunteering their time to support people in reentry! But on the third day, after he told the story for the sixth or seventh time, Tom added a tragic detail: Earlier that year, before his visit, a Hogoshi was murdered by a person on probation.
The tragedy sparked debate about whether Japan should move toward a more ‘professionalized’ system. Some family members of Hogoshi confided to Tom that they worried about safety, and others admitted they make sure they’re out of the house during visits. This noble idea may not stand up in the face of tragedy. This approach may look bright and shiny at the outset, but it’s a process that relies on community care with true buy-in from the larger community, a buy-in necessary to weather the risk highlighted by the tragedy.
Collaboration, Evaluation, and Finding Our Burning Stars
The research tells us that true collaboration and partnership between government entities - in this equation, those responsible for administering justice - and community organizations can go a long way in tackling this question of responsibility. I’m reminded of a collection of essays by Jeremy Travis and Bruce Western in their recent book, Parsimony and Other Radical Ideas About Justice. In the book, scholars and practitioners envision a world in which we focus on safety, not punishment, and where resources can actually go a lot further when meaningfully invested in building community power to welcome people home instead of maintaining state supervision and carceral control.
What does a world look like where the responsibility for support and resources lies with our government institutions and the responsibility for care lies with our communities? During Tom’s tour, we heard many examples of how government entities beyond the DOC, like the Department of Human Services (DHS), for example, need to remove existing barriers to accessing employment and licensing so that those who are closest to the issues, those with direct lived experience, can create systems of care. We also heard examples of state agencies stepping in and stepping up, hiring those with lived experience to change the delivery of service. We can see these bright spots in these dark places, but without knowing the impact of these efforts, we cannot know whether the change is meaningful.
Being a parent of young daughters allows me to lean on movies like Encanto and the brilliance of Lin-Manuel Miranda to better illustrate my point: stars don’t shine, they burn. And the constellations shift. Let us build on the promise of powerful practice by committing to leaning into our responsibilities both as community members and system actors. Let us not simply applaud the promising practices—the shining stars—but instead seek a deeper understanding of them, evaluate them, and ensure that we are making changes that truly transform our criminal legal system into one that serves justice. That is the mission of the MNJRC and why I love doing the work I do.
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