Photo courtesy of Department of Corrections
St. Cloud Prison
Walls. They sure don’t build ’em like this anymore.
Driving northwest on Highway 10 toward the fringes of St. Cloud, you see the 128-foot-tall granite water tower first. With the gas stations and motels still in the distance, the century-old spire rises from the pine-specked fields. Then, at last, the trees part and you’re upon it.
The aging granite fortress that is the Minnesota Correctional Facility–St. Cloud (established 1889) lurks in its own shadow—a gothic edifice dropped on the landscape as if from the brain of Stephen King.
Surrounding this real-life Shawshank and its roughly 1,000 inmates? A wall, of course.
But not just any wall. This wall is a 1.5-mile-long, 22-foot-high, 4.5-foot-wide granite bulwark that, upon completion in 1916, became the longest in the United States, and second only to the Great Wall of China on the world stage.
St. Cloud’s foremost fortification has been scaring passersby straight for more than a century. Yet it had never occurred to us to skip work and drive up to take a look around. That is, until the question of a wall—this one along the Mexican border, at a cost of $5.7 billion—took the federal government prisoner this winter. What could Minnesota, the star of the North, teach Washington about how to build a quality barrier in the Southwest? Something permanent, classy, and definitely imposing?
The prison currently functions as the intake facility for all adult male inmates in Minnesota. But I get in the easy way: I call warden Shannon Reimann and, on a recent January morning, nearly a month into the partial government shutdown, she graciously shows me around.
“Initially there was a wood wall around the perimeter,” Reimann says. “But it was too expensive to keep it up. So, in 1905, they made the decision to have the offenders quarry the granite.”
It took those offenders 11 years, working mostly with hand tools, to fully enclose the 50-plus-acre prison grounds. (Along the way, the laborers excavated three 80-foot-deep holes; today, they’re filled with rainwater and stocked with walleye. Kidding: They’re ringed by protective fencing so no one drowns.)
Photo courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society
St. Cloud Inmates in 1914
St. Cloud inmates in 1914, quarrying granite for the wall they were building around themselves.
Four inmates managed to go over the wall in 1957. And, as the warden points out, it now needs some major tuckpointing. But in person, from outside the prison, the century-old wall looks as formidable as ever.
And yet Reimann reminds me that they don’t build prisons like this anymore. Not out of granite. Not in a Romanesque Revival style that evokes an Ivy League institution. And especially not surrounded by 20-foot-high stone walls.
Why not? “With technology, there’s better security measures than a granite wall,” Reimann says. “There’s fencing technology. Sensors. Cameras. So, how do we become a modern prison in a historical landmark? By encompassing those components within our perimeter.”
As we sit in her office with no view outside, I assume she’s talking about retrofitting the wall with some modern technology. A sensor here. A camera there. I don’t fully comprehend what she meant until a half-hour later, when we step out into the January chill to walk around the place.
After emerging from the sprawl of shop buildings and cell blocks, we make it to the grassy yard. There, the enclosure opens to fields for baseball and football, and the three quarry ponds.
That’s when I notice it. Running along the inside perimeter of (arguably) the greatest American wall ever built is a wire fence.
