The state prison in Bayport, Minnesota, is older than the state itself. It first opened its doors as a limestone building on the bank of the St. Croix River in the nearby town of Stillwater, several years before Minnesota was incorporated as a state in 1858. The maximum security men’s facility—officially called Minnesota State Prison, but often still referred to as “Stillwater”—is of another age: There’s no air conditioning, and its cells are locked by metal bars rather than the solid steel doors most prisons have today. And in a few years, state officials say, the prison will shutter entirely.
Stillwater’s state of disrepair fell into sharp relief in 2023, when incarcerated people staged a protest inside the facility over conditions such as tainted water, lack of access to ice or showers during a heatwave, and extended lockdowns resulting from short staffing. State officials have estimated that the necessary repairs to make the prison functional would cost $180 million. Instead, Minnesota Department of Corrections officials say they intend to permanently close the prison by June 2029.
The number of both incarcerated people and prison staff at Stillwater has already been cut in half since May 2025, with the state gradually transferring prisoners to other facilities across Minnesota to prepare for closure. There are now fewer than 600 men incarcerated at Stillwater, and fewer than than 300 staff on site. And as Stillwater’s population dwindles, the Minnesota Department of Corrections has used the transition as an opportunity to pilot an experimental housing model that Corrections Commissioner Paul Schnell told the St. Paul Pioneer Press will provide more stable environments while using fewer staff resources.
Men still incarcerated at Stillwater now have the opportunity to reside in what the prison calls Earned Living Units, where they’re afforded more autonomy and independence than traditional cell units typically allow. Those who apply and are accepted into the program are not only able to set their own work and activity schedules, but also collectively influence how the unit operates. To qualify, the men need to have served at least one year in prison, have a release date after October 1, 2026, shown good past behavior, and progress toward their goals. As of 2025, Pioneer Press reported that 298 men incarcerated at Stillwater had won the right to live in Earned Living Units.
The new model allows the men freedom of movement throughout the prison. They’ve developed community projects of their own devising, including a barber shop and a garden. The unit also emphasizes the agency of its incarcerated residents to establish their own communal guidelines. In October, the unit members drafted a mission statement, complete with a set of core values, including “having compassion and remorse for the people we hurt.”
In the United States—which incarcerates more people than any other country on Earth—prisoners very rarely have the opportunity to make any meaningful choices about their daily lives. As the Brennan Center for Justice noted in a recent report, for most people in prison, “Life behind bars is marked by social and physical isolation and punctuated by violence and brutality.” Many incarcerated people have found ways to assert their agency within a dehumanizing institution: Prisoners at Stillwater, for example, have published an in-house newspaper called the Prison Mirror for more than a century. But prison staff and administrators have rarely cooperated with efforts to afford incarcerated people more independence, particularly in high-security facilities.
As incarcerated writer Jeffery Shockley argued in a 2023 piece for the Prison Journalism Project, the fact that two-thirds of those released from prison end up back behind bars within three years speaks to the failure of prisons to engage in any meaningful rehabilitation efforts. “Once we complete the programs,” Shockley wrote, “we remain warehoused and deteriorating.” Those with long sentences, he added, are often just “waiting to die.”
Joseph Soltis, who has been incarcerated at Stillwater for years and now lives in the Earned Living Unit, put a long-held dream into action by opening a barber shop within the prison. The shop not only offers hair cuts, but also job skills and a place for his fellow prisoners to hang out.
Many experts say experiences like Soltis’s are far too uncommon within the prison system. Research from the Prison Policy Institute shows that incarceration often worsens people’s mental health, in part due to loss of autonomy and separation from community outside. And fortunately, Stillwater’s experiment won’t end when the prison closes for good in 2029: Schnell has indicated that the Earned Living Units program will be expanded to other sites across Minnesota, offering more incarcerated people access to basic freedoms which many have been deprived of for years or decades.