Facts and Policy Reforms for Minnesota
Minnesota’s prison population has grown astronomically in recent decades.
While the national state imprisonment rate dropped by 7 percent between 2000 and 2016, Minnesota’s imprisonment rate spiked by a staggering 51 percent. As of July 2019, there were 9,849 people imprisoned in the state, with another 111,000 adults under community supervision like probation and parole. There were 6,000 people held in county jails in 2015, the year with the most recent available data.
Revocations from community supervision play a big role in Minnesota’s swollen prison population – in 2018, 41 percent of people who entered prison did so because of a community supervision violation. The vast majority of that group — 88 percent —had only violated the conditions of supervision, meaning no new crime was committed. That same year, one in five people in prison imprisoned in the state were there for a drug offense. Between 2001 and 2017 there was a 69 percent increase in people sent to prison for a felony, much of which was due to drug offense convictions, which more than doubled during that period.
Unsurprisingly, Minnesota’s incarceration crisis has had a particularly severe impact on people of color, especially Black people. In 2017, Black Minnesotans accounted for only 5.6 percent of the state’s adult population but were 34 percent of its prison population. For Native American Minnesotans, the numbers are similarly troubling: Despite making up only 1.1 percent of the state’s population, they comprised 9.6 percent of its prison population.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Minnesota can dramatically reduce its incarcerated population by implementing just a few sensible reforms:
- Moving away from a culture of criminalization by halting the expansion of the criminal code to include ever more new offenses.
- Decriminalizing marijuana, particularly given the known racial disparities in the policing of marijuana possession.
- Passing laws to institute statewide oversight of prosecutors.
- Reforming its probation and supervised release systems, including limitations on length of supervision and reductions in the amount of time a person is required serve in a correctional facility.
Were Minnesota to follow these and other reforms outlined in the ACLU’s Smart Justice blueprint, by 2025 it could have 5,484 fewer people in prison, saving more than $400 million dollars that could be spent on schools, roads, and other services for state residents.
For more information, along with detailed breakdowns of Minnesota’s prison population and the reforms needed to reduce it, click here.