The Stillwater jail in Minnesota will be isolated until Tuesday, after a hundred prisoners refused to return to their cells on Saturday. This was reported by ABC News, which also detailed that the situation is already mostly resolved.
At the height of the crisis, an emergency closure was decreed and both a crisis negotiation and Special Operations Response Team were deployed.
A spokesman for the Department of Corrections said the environment remained "calm, peaceful and stable throughout the day" and that inmates had expressed their displeasure due to the time limit they spent outside their cells, according to the AP.
"It's supposed to be a record week of heat and they got us locked in our cells," one of the inmates protested in a call reproduced by Fox 9. "No air conditioning, no water, no ice, no showers, no nothing." He also claimed that in recent months they had had to spend most of their time inside their cells.
Minnesota Correctional Commissioner Paul Schnell acknowledged that the latter was due to understaffing. Schnell also admitted that it was "exceedingly hot" in the facilities and argued that the building was more than a hundred years old. He also acknowledged that the underlying problems had no immediate solution, but that they were trying to solve them.
The NGO, Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, called the conditions inhumane and said it was time to reduce the prison population. Schnell objected this proposal.
