Minnesota prisons recently began to record the tribal affiliations of Native Americans inmates.

Officials hope that the years-in-the-making move will shed further light on racial disparities that exist within the state prison system. They say it could also give them a better idea of where inmates are going after their release and what their closest options for social service providers will be.

“The plan is that once we hit a discharge date,” said Minnesota Department of Corrections tribal liaison Randy Goodwin, “we can let those tribal governments know that somebody from their tribe or band is coming.”

The DOC already keeps tabs on the racial makeup of the state prison population but did not previously ask Native American inmates if they claimed any tribal affiliations. An agency report from last month shows that, as is the case in several other states, Native Americans are over-represented in Minnesota prisons.

At the start of 2020, Native Americans made up approximately 8.7 percent of the 9,381 inmates housed in the the state prison system. That’s despite the fact only about 1.4 percent of Minnesota’s total population is Native American, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The disparity does not appear to be lost on DOC officials. It’s something that Gino Anselmo, warden of the state prison in Togo in northern Minnesota, said came up repeatedly during department-sponsored listening sessions in tribal communities.

What meeting attendees especially wanted to know, Anselmo said, was “where people from their particular tribe were in the corrections system.”

The meetings and the new record-keeping policy they spawned were the result of an executive order signed by former Gov. Mark Dayton in late 2013, Anselmo said. Reauthorized last year by Gov. Tim Walz, the order directs state agencies to work more closely with tribal governments and their constituents.

A spokesperson for the DOC could not immediately confirm when the agency officially began to record inmate tribal affiliations. Anselmo, the DOC’s tribal liaison before Goodwin, said state case managers began to ask for affiliations on an informal basis in 2018.

DOC officials briefed the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council on the official implementation of tribal affiliation policy at a mid-February meeting to a warm response.

How the information will be used may vary. Learning about inmate tribal affiliations, Goodwin said for example, might help prison case managers and DOC workers to try to build relationships with the men and women in their custody.

It might also help case workers to better connect inmates to the social service organizations nearest their reservations upon release, he said.

State Rep. Mary Kunesh-Podein, DFL-New Brighton, an American Indian lawmaker and member of the People of Color and Indigenous Caucus, said the initiative might eventually reveal which tribes, if any, produce disproportionate amounts of inmates.

“If we really know those and we know the numbers, where they’re coming from, where these things are happening, then we can really address why is that happening,” she said.

For now, only newly incarcerated inmates are being asked about their tribal affiliations. But in time, Aneslmo said, the plan is to ask those who are already locked up as well.

“Our goal is to eventually have it tracked for everybody in the system,” he said.

Goodwin said that only state prisons will ask inmates about their tribal affiliations. County jails, he said, determine whether to do so on their own.

Dana Ferguson contributed to this report.