Minnesota
JRI Year: 2023
2023
Background
Minnesota had the nation’s fifth-highest rate of people on probation, with 2 in every 100 adults in the state on probation as of 2018, and more than 60 percent of prison admissions were due to supervision violations. To address these challenges, state leaders launched a Justice Reinvestment Initiative to improve community supervision outcomes and increase the likelihood of success for people on probation and supervised release across all communities in Minnesota. CSG Justice Center staff collected and analyzed state data to inform the development of policy options to strengthen public safety, improve the outcomes of people on community supervision, and ensure equitable distribution of resources across the state. While JRI policy provisions failed to pass as part of a larger public safety omnibus bill during the 2022 session, state and local stakeholders expressed support for continuing to explore administrative improvements to supervision practices, as well as future changes to the state’s supervision funding formula.1
Policies
In the spring of 2023, the legislature passed Senate File 2909, an $880 million omnibus public safety bill. The portion of the bill concerning community supervision practices was informed by the 2021–2022 JRI efforts and included input from all 87 counties, tribal representatives, and the Department of Corrections. The bill creates a stable and equitable funding formula for community supervision across the three supervision delivery systems, creates a community supervision grant innovation program, and establishes a Community Supervision Advisory Committee that will be tasked with drafting numerous policy recommendations to bring uniform evidence-based best practices to all three delivery systems.
For more information, see Justice Reinvestment in Minnesota.
JRI-Driven Policies and Practices
- Authorize/develop/modify graduated responses or matrices for violations
- Require/improve risk-needs assessment
- Require evidence-based practices
- Require data collection/performance measures
- Establish/extend oversight council
- Establish/improve quality assurance/continuous policy improvement policies or practices
- Standardize or assess use of best practices across the state
- Establish state-level grant program to fund community-based services
- Expand gender-responsive practices
Other JRI-Funded Projects
In Minnesota, the CSG Justice Center, Correctional Leaders Association, and American Probation and Parole Association are partnering in technical assistance efforts to support the adoption and implementation of the National Guidelines for Post-Conviction Risk and Needs Assessment.
1 The Council of State Governments Justice Center, 2023, Justice Reinvestment in Minnesota, New York, NY: The Council of State Governments Justice Center, retrieved May 18, 2023 from https://csgjusticecenter.org/projects/justice-reinvestment/current-states/minnesota/.
Photo by Ken Lund and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
