(ABC 6 News) – Every year, hatcheries across Minnesota work to restock our rivers and lakes with fish of all types. It takes a lot of help, and that’s where the Fillmore County Corrections Department comes in.

In about a month, more than 100,000 young steelhead trout will be traveling from the Lanesboro State Fish Hatchery to rivers up north that feed into Lake Superior.

Before they can go, though, they need to be marked.

“We’re marking these fish by adipose fin clip,” said hatchery supervisor Scott Sindelar. “That’s so that anglers can tell the difference between a hatchery fish and a wild fish which still has the adipose fin and those fish must be released back into the water.”

The adipose is a tiny fin towards the back end of salmonids, like trout, that for a long time has been thought to be functionally useless to the fish – which is why clipping the fin is an easy way to differentiate farmed fish from wild fish.

It’s a decades old process that most people consider relatively harmless.

“I think of clipping the adipose fin like clipping your fingernails,” said Sindelar. “Like it’s something that you know that you don’t really need, you don’t really use, and it doesn’t hurt when you clip it either.”

Some research, however, suggests a greater purpose for the fin than previously thought.

Still, proponents of the process say the benefits of marking this way outweigh the potential negatives.

“It gives anglers a harvest opportunity for steelhead so they can actually have something to keep but while also protecting the wild spawning populations of steelhead,” said Sindelar.

Either way, marking thousands of fish every year is a big job, requiring extra hands.

That’s where the Minnesota “Sentencing to Service” program comes in, where non-violent inmates are given work opportunities while serving time.

In Fillmore County, the program has been around for 27 years, offering alternative sentencing options to hundreds of inmates.

The work not only benefits the communities of Fillmore, as projects extend from fin clipping to construction to trail building, but also the inmates themselves.

“One of the really great outcomes for inmates who have been on this crew is they’ve gotten employment opportunities from employers just for their experience out on the work crew,” said Fillmore Sheriff John DeGeorge.

The inmates working at the hatchery – kept anonymous for privacy reasons – credit the program for giving them an incentive to move past the worst day of their lives.

“It’s been amazing to do something important with my time instead of sitting around doing nothing,” one said.

Another said the opportunity to work alongside members of law enforcement, who often swap out with the crew leaders, helps both sides understand each other better.

“We’re all just people in here clipping fish fins,” said DeGeorge.

As successful as the program has been, its future is now uncertain.

State budget cuts have now included the STS funds, as the government grapples with the looming deficit in the next few years.

Twenty-five percent of the funds to manage the STS program come from the state, while the county picks up the rest of the tab.

The fact the county already pays for most of the program already, though, has pushed Fillmore officials to attempt to manage the program on its own.

“This has been the most successful diversionary program that Fillmore County has had and we don’t want to see it go away,” DeGeorge said. “I think there’s a sense of pride with how well it runs and how much the community supports it that we want to make sure we keep it going here at no expense to our taxpayers.”