Former Minneapolis police officer and now convicted murderer Derek Chauvin woke up Wednesday morning at the Minnesota Correctional Facility-Oak Park Heights penitentiary.
After being denied bail following his guilty verdict, Chauvin was shipped off to the prison, which sits about 25 miles away from downtown Minneapolis and where George Floyd was murdered last May.
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His cell, where he has no roommates, will be Chauvin’s new home for the next eight weeks until his sentencing hearing.
He has been placed on suicide watch, meaning prison guards will monitor him around the clock. Guards are also there to protect Chauvin’s safety, as former police officers rarely find friends behind bars.
“Oak Park Heights is the highest custody level in the Minnesota DOC system. However, the majority of inmates housed here are maximum and close custody, as some of the inmates need a higher level of security,” the Minneapolis Department of Corrections said.
MCF-Oak Park Heights is Minnesota’s only maximum-security prison. No prisoner has ever escaped from the facility, which was built in 1982.
Just over 400 inmates are currently housed in the prison.
“Educational programming includes Adult Basic Education (ABE), including literacy, digital literacy, and General Educational Development (GED) State Adult and High School diploma programs. Oak Park Heights is also credentialed to offer computer career programming,” a description of the prison reads. “Inmates have the opportunity to earn certificates in Introduction to Computers and Microsoft Office Systems. The New Perspective (the incarcerated newspaper) has been in production since the late 1980’s.”
Over the years, murderers and rapists have spent their lives in the prison. The serial killer Paul Michael Stephani spent years there before his death in 1998.
Lawrence Scott Dame, who killed his sister, brother-in-law, and their three children while they slept, was sent to the prison in 2001.
MCF-Oak Park Heights is laid out in such a way as to minimize conflict between other prisoners and was once the subject of an architecture magazine profile.
Only one nonnatural death of an inmate has ever been reported at the prison. In 2013, inmate Shane Lawrence Cooper was strangled to death by another prisoner after word got out he was a convicted child molester.
Chauvin was found guilty of two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter. The sentences for his crimes are most likely to be given concurrently, meaning he would face a maximum of 40 years in prison for second-degree murder. His guilty verdict was applauded by activists, Democrats, and a handful of Republicans.
Few police officers are ever convicted of murder, with only eight being found guilty since 2005. Another 23 officers were found guilty of manslaughter during the same period of time.
In 2019, former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor was found guilty of third-degree murder and manslaughter charges for his role in the death of Justine Ruszczyk. He was sentenced to 12.5 years in prison in 2019.
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Although originally held in MC-Oak Park Heights, he was quickly moved to a prison out of state out of concern for his safety.
