On Tuesday, July 9 the Dakota County Board of Commissioners approved the creation of 12 full-time positions to staff the Jail Integrative Health Unit, a new addition to the Dakota County Jail meant to address growing mental health issues within the jail population.
The 28-bed, $12 million addition is meant to be a stop-gap for individuals who are waiting for beds in state hospitals like the Minnesota Security Hospital in St. Peter. The Integrative Health Unit was described as an “intensive care unit for the jail” by Dakota County Sheriff Joe Leko, with well-being checks every 25 minutes, natural light and a more comforting environment for those being held there.
Currently there isn’t a space for treatment in the Dakota County Jail which forces staff to hold these inmates in intake cells for closer supervision during times of crises or if the individual is suicidal. Moving an individual from general population to intake can occur “daily,” said Sheriff Leko. Especially when it comes to treating those with severe mental illness, intake is “not a conducive environment that can create more trauma,” he said.
According to a 2023 request for state funding, roughly one quarter of the incarnated population in the Dakota County Law Enforcement Center “suffers from serious health conditions requiring special care.”
“They should not be in jail. They should be in a hospital,” said Leko.
Before 2023, Minnesota law dictated that certain inmates who have been civilly committed must be moved to a state-operated mental health facility within 48 hours of a commitment. That law was revoked in the 2024 Omnibus Human Servies appropriations bill SF 2934 in no small part due to lack of availability of state beds in the first place. Waiting for a state bed to open up can take weeks, months, or longer than a year.
According to Leko, this trend is a long time coming. The number of state beds has been declining for years, matched with an increase in mental health issues among incarcerated populations.
“Those are going in different directions,” said Leko.
The 12 positions approved on July 9 are backfill for jail positions rather than healthcare workers for the unit. Dakota County Jail currently contracts for healthcare with Advanced Correctional Healthcare, the largest jail contract management company in the United States. Part of the logic of the Integrative Health Unit is to bring all those requiring more intensive care together so that doctors and nurses can treat them in one location, “rather than running around the entire jail,” said Leko.
The addition comes from a 2020 Needs Assessment for the Law Enforcement Center which found that “a dedicated medical and mental health unit was justified based on documented need and that the most efficient way to achieve the maximum impact was to complete some interior renovation work and to design and construct a building addition,” according to the Dakota County 2023 Recovery Plan Performance Report.
From that report, the addition was expected to cost $15 million, with construction to begin in the fall of 2023. The COVID-19 Pandemic was cited as a cause of increased “isolation, stress, and anxiety across the general population, which further highlighted these needs in the jail population.”
According to Leko, the trend of increased mental health issues predates the pandemic and has more to do with diagnoses rather than a true increase.
“I think there is just more awareness of it,” he said.
Unlike in prior decades, it is more common to treat issues like drug addiction as a potential symptom of a deeper root cause like mental health issues.
“These aren’t bad people that are committing crimes. They made a bad decision and there might be underlying issues there,” said Leko.