Commission staff present 2024 felony sentencing data showing prison-rate gap and racial disparities

Commission staff presented the Sentencing Guidelines Commission with 2024 felony sentencing data on Dec. 18, 2025, highlighting trends, departure rates and demographic disparities across judicial districts.

Leah, a staff presenter, told commissioners that “in 2024, there were 14,229 felony cases sentenced.” Staff reported that the sentencing guidelines recommended prison in 38% of cases, while the actual prison rate was 25% — a gap of 13.7 percentage points that has grown over time and reached similar highs in 2021 and 2023.

Katie, another staff presenter, summarized departures: the total departure rate rose historically to about 29% in 2024, driven largely by an increase in mitigated dispositional departures (where a presumptive prison recommendation is stayed and probation imposed). Among presumptive commit cases, 41% received mitigated dispositional departures in 2024. The presentation also showed that mitigated durational departures among executed prison cases have fallen; the mitigated durational departure rate among prison cases was 17% in 2024, the lowest since the 1980s.

The presentation emphasized racial and gender differentials. Staff noted that in 2024 Black adults were about 8% of Minnesota's adult population but made up about 30% of people sentenced and about 40% of those in prison. American Indian adults were 2% of the population and accounted for about 9% of sentenced people and 9% of those in prison. Staff pointed to large variation across judicial districts in both recommended and actual prison rates.

Commissioners asked for clarifications about whether figures reflected initial sentences (staff: yes, they represent initial 2024 sentences and do not track later revocations) and whether the data could isolate outcomes for treatment or specialty courts (staff: no, not reliably — courts do not consistently report a specific data flag for specialty-court processing). Members noted that the commission might seek better data fields or coordination with judicial-branch data custodians to isolate the impact of treatment courts.

The 2024 data will be included in the draft report to the legislature; commissioners requested that staff reconcile editorial and data-file notes (for example, clarifying counts in appendices and reconciling slightly different counts of staff inquiries presented in the draft).