Editor’s Note: This is a second part in a series on the St. Louis County jails.

REGIONAL- The officer approached the cell door with a lunch tray in hand.
“John, time to eat.”
Inside, the inmate was twitching with nervous energy, sleepless now for two days. He stood motionless for a beat, then turned slowly toward the officer, eyes wide and wild.
“You think I’m stupid?” he hissed. “You think I don’t see the cameras in the sandwich?”
“It’s just food, man,” the officer replied calmly. “Same tray everyone else gets.”
John laughed, a sudden, sharp bark. Then, without warning, he kicked the door with full force. The clang echoed across the pod.
“Back off!” he shouted. “Back off or I’ll bash my head in and make you watch!”
The officer stepped back instinctively and keyed his radio. “I need another set of eyes on pod three. We’ve got escalation.”
Inside the cell, John pounded the wall with his fists, muttering something about wires in his skin.
The officer didn’t press further, trying to de-escalate the situation.
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Scenes like this one, though fictionalized, mirror what corrections officers at the St. Louis County Jail face routinely. Nearly 1,400 inmates annually, or about 35 percent of total bookings, are flagged for mental health concerns. Those experiencing severe mental illness may misinterpret basic commands, perceive threats that don’t exist, and react with confusion, fear, or sudden aggression. Even routine interactions like delivering meals or issuing lockdown orders can escalate rapidly when inmates can’t distinguish reality from delusion.
Methamphetamine-induced psychosis only magnifies the risk. Its tendency to spark paranoia, delusions, and aggression has made inmate management not just more complex, but more dangerous. According to Jail Administrator Jessica Pete, assaults on corrections officers have risen significantly since she began working at the jail in 2003. Inmate-on-inmate violence is also climbing, with ten serious assaults reported in 2024, up from just three in 2019.
Today’s inmate population is a serious mismatch for a facility opened in 1995 with a layout rooted in a very different philosophy for a very different inmate population. At the time, a direct supervision, communal model was considered progressive— a way to build rapport, defuse tension, and reduce isolation. Three large dormitory-style pods with commons areas, two holding 60 men each and a third for 31 women, were intended to foster interaction and reduce tension through constant visibility and contact. Cells had wooden doors with slit windows, not bars. Officers were placed in pods, not behind glass, to interact with inmates. The thinking was, if you treat people with a degree of normalcy, many will respond in kind.
That design philosophy, which took root in the 1980s and gained momentum in the early ’90s, worked well for a facility housing mostly pretrial detainees or low-level offenders with relatively stable behavior. It assumed that most inmates would be able to interact within a shared commons area, follow instructions, and self-regulate with a single officer present and a second monitoring from a second-story control center.
But today, with one in three inmates experiencing untreated or poorly managed mental illness, often complicated by substance-induced psychosis, those assumptions no longer hold. The same openness that once helped officers build rapport now creates more exposure, more volatility, and limits their ability to isolate or stabilize people in crisis.
Intake process
The door clangs shut behind the squad car, sealing off the sally port from the outside world. This is where confinement begins.
Arresting officers lead the newly arrested through a second set of doors into the intake area, a long, rectangular room anchored by an oval-shaped booking counter. It’s the jail’s central funnel and can get crowded fast. Around the perimeter, holding cells line the walls, often full, as medical screenings, paperwork, and classification evaluations stack up.
But the room wasn’t built to handle this many people.
Nearly 4,000 individuals come through the Duluth jail each year. The Minnesota Department of Corrections has repeatedly flagged the intake area as too small to meet demand, warning that it fails to meet inmate separation standards and doesn’t have adequate space to store inmates’ property. One inspection noted that the space “does not allow for the required separation requirements under Chapter 2911 standards,” especially during high-traffic periods when multiple transports arrive back-to-back.
To keep up, the jail has improvised – two telephone rooms in the intake area have been converted into makeshift holding cells.
Once processed, inmates exchange their street clothes for jail-issued orange. They are searched for contraband, which can include a scan by a full-body scanner purchased with COVID-related funding. A new pilot program using a trained canine adds another layer of security aimed at keeping drugs and other banned items out of the facility.
For additional security, even mail gets screened – but not at the jail. All personal correspondence must now be sent to a Maryland-based processing center run by a company called TextBehind. There, letters and photos are scanned after being screened for prohibited content, then electronically transmitted to the jail for printing and delivery to the inmates. The jail no longer accepts direct personal mail; anything sent to the facility is returned to sender. The change is part of an effort to reduce the smuggling of drug-laced paper and other prohibited materials.
Health care
Mental health care often starts with something more fundamental: access to basic health care. For inmates entering the jail in the middle of a mental health crisis – hallucinating, confused, or severely dysregulated – stabilization depends as much on clinical support as it does on supervision. Without that, there’s no clear path toward treatment, just containment.
That’s where the jail’s partnership with St. Luke’s Hospital comes in. The on-site medical clinic is compact but well equipped. Staffed by physician assistants, nurses, and overseen by a medical director, the clinic provides services many county jails can’t. They run electrocardiograms, ultrasounds, pulmonary tests, and lab work right inside the facility.
Medications are distributed by clinic staff rather than correctional officers, ensuring continuity and proper oversight. The clinic also has two negative-pressure cells available to safely house inmates with contagious respiratory conditions.
Juggling challenging inmates
Inmates are classified based on a mix of factors: gender, age, criminal history, behavioral risk, and mental health needs. But the number of available cells doesn’t always match the range of classifications.
The jail’s smaller isolation and special management pods, designed to house people who need separation for safety or psychiatric reasons, can only hold a few inmates at a time. And while each has a small commons area, only a limited number of inmates can access it at a time, sometimes only one if their classification is particularly severe.
And while the special pods are necessary, being placed there can heighten an inmate’s sense of isolation and contribute to a possible escalation of mental health symptoms.
Because the space is limited, the routine of one of the men’s general population pods has been modified, Pete said. The pod houses different classifications of inmates, and since they can’t be mixed, the time inmates in this pod have out of their cells is significantly reduced to provide out-of-cell time for each group. DOC inspectors have noted that while this practice meets standards, it’s a short-term fix for a long-term facility issue in need of being addressed.
On the Iron Range
The challenges at the Duluth jail are surely relevant to the Iron Range and northern St. Louis County, as 40-45 percent of the inmates there are from communities in the northern half of the county.
Most begin their incarceration at the Virginia and Hibbing satellite jails. Hibbing can accommodate eight inmates, while Virginia can hold 12, larger because there are more local police forces that use the Virginia facility.
Captain Robert Pennington oversees both jails, which are used for holds of up to 72 hours. Pennington said that an inmate might be there longer than that when the district court branches in those locations are closed for Monday holidays and initial court appearances are delayed, but all with extended jail time are transported to Duluth.
Perhaps the biggest challenge for the satellite jails, Pennington noted, is that they are typically staffed with only one corrections officer. That places the burden for doing everything from intake to dispensing medications and meals as well as required checks on inmates on that one person. Pennington said he can bring in another officer if there are special circumstances that warrant it, but usually a single officer is sufficient, even with the multiple roles they take on.
Both facilities have something Duluth doesn’t have – a video system to monitor inmates in their cells, as well as all other areas in the jails. Cameras are carefully placed to provide privacy for toileting, and the system cannot be used to replace the required periodic physical inmate checks, but the system does provide closer monitoring for inmates who need it, such as those who may be having some kind of crisis. And for another layer of security, the corrections officer in Hibbing can access the video system in Virginia right from their desktop computer, and vice versa. Pennington noted that it would be extremely expensive to retrofit the Duluth facility with such a system.
The Virginia and Hibbing facilities don’t have in-jail access to the supportive services available at the Duluth jail. The psychologist in Duluth is accessible through teleconferencing, but other health services would require outside providers.
Challenging, too, Pennington said, is what happens when inmates are released back to their communities. Whether it’s directly from a 72-hour lockup or an extended stay in Duluth, the problem remains the same: the northern half of the county has far fewer resources for social services to help inmates re-enter society with better odds they won’t soon be back in custody.
An expensive fix
The three jails have consistently scored at the top of DOC inspection checklists for both mandatory requirements and “essential” ones such as access to educational opportunities, religious services, and more. Those high marks, however, mask a harsher reality - the Duluth jail is due for an extreme, and likely costly, makeover.
“The St. Louis County Jail was constructed in 1995. The National Institute of Corrections estimates the life expectancy of a jail operating 24 hours a day 7 days a week to be between 25 and 30 years, depending on facility usage,” the 2024 inspection report notes. “It is recommended that St. Louis County continue to study the long-term correctional needs of the community and their current facility. Any future planning for additional bed space should include a review of the core functions of the facility including intake areas, kitchen, laundry, storage, and inmate programming to ensure they can support the addition.”
It’s hard to grasp that a facility so attractive from the outside and so well-maintained inside could be at the end of its useful life, but understanding the challenges presented by a new and more problematic generation of inmates with mental health issues leads to an obvious conclusion – accommodations are necessary for the jail to continue to serve its purpose effectively for the community into the future, as well as to provide for the mental health needs of inmates.
In the third part of this series, we’ll look at ways corrections officers are supported in their work, how community resources interface with the jail, and how policy changes may affect jail operations.