The facility is designed and employed with trained security officers to handle not only Minnesota's high-risk inmates but other states' as well.

[4] Frank Wood, the warden of Minnesota Correctional Facility – Stillwater prison, offered input for the plan.

According to the Minnesota Department of Corrections, the prison's nine complexes are "specialized uniquely to help facilitate a safe, secure, and humane environment for the offenders incarcerated as well as the staff who work at Oak Park Heights".

Constructed in 1981, MCF-OPH is the state's only Level-Five (Maximum) Custody Level prison for men, with an inmate population just under 350.

The prison is architecturally designed into the side of a hill to accommodate 481 inmates on a 160-acre (0.65 km2) site, which is connected by two corridors on separate levels.

It is too narrow to escape through if the inmate could break the reinforced glass, and tests have proven it would take approximately twelve thousand hacksaw blades to cut through the steel bars of the prison.

Not only does the prison provide a courtyard with a baseball field, but also includes an administration building, a religious resource room, gymnasium, security control center, staffed training fitness area, warehouses, a loading dock, and indoor firing range.

Offenders in these complexes range from those serving segregation time, to those who are in education toward a GED, or working full-time in the facility as cooks, janitors, painters, or workers in the institution's industry units.

Inmates who qualify for these work programs are employed to process and package commissary orders from the other state correctional facilities.

National Geographic has also produced an episode of America's Hardest Prisons on the Oak Park Heights Facility.

The original fence used high tech vibration sensing technology from Israel that is no longer manufactured or supported.