Jailbreak
A look at legislation set to reduce prison and community supervision time for thousands of Minnesota’s convicted felons.
In the midst of the torrent of progressive legislation in 2023 during the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) “trifecta” of power in Minnesota’s state government, the Minnesota Rehabilitation and Reinvestment Act (MRRA), aimed at correctional reform, was passed. Given the other bills debated in 2023, the MRRA passed quietly into law. However, given that the MRRA represents a sweeping change to Minnesota’s state correctional policy, it deserves more attention.
The MRRA was introduced to incentivize prisoner and community supervisee participation in programming, thereby reducing recidivism. The incentive proposed was early release, and the costs saved by holding prisoners for shorter periods were identified as an opportunity to “reinvest” in public safety.
The Department of Corrections (DOC) supported the bill, saying the MRRA would result in “fewer victims,” “safer prisons,” an and “safer and healthier communities.”
The MRRA
Components of the MRRA
The MRRA is divided into four components.
1. An individualized rehabilitation plan for each inmate/supervisee.
2. Early release. This can be “earned” through participation in prescribed rehabilitation programming, including mental health and substance abuse treatment, vocational skills training, and education.
3. Earned supervision abatement. This can be earned by those under community supervision by maintaining employment, chemical and mental health aftercare counseling, and positive family and community reintegration. The total length of time spent on supervision does not decrease, but the active supervision ends.
4. Justice reinvestment. The cash savings realized through inmates serving less time will be reinvested into:
- Victim support services
- Crime prevention and intervention
- Community-based correctional programs
- The state’s General Fund
Earned release incentive
Most prisoners will be eligible for earned early release. Prisoners who demonstrate successful participation in programming will be able to reduce their prison term by an additional 17 percent over current policy, resulting in a total reduction of up to 50 percent.
Then, for those released from prison to community supervision, a reduction of up to 33 percent of their active supervision time is possible by continued participation in prescribed programming, maintaining employment, and demonstrating positive family and community reintegration. This reduction is called “supervision abatement.”
The DOC estimates that 20 percent of prisoners are “idle” and not participating in programming or work details during their imprisonment. Idleness is believed to contribute to as much as a 13 percent increase in recidivism and increases in violent misconduct while imprisoned.
The DOC also estimates that involvement in programming or work can decrease recidivism from 12 to 30 percent depending on the number of programming interventions involved.
There is little doubt that improving the rate of earnest involvement in programming, work details, and vocational training can have a positive effect on behavior and recidivism.
The question is whether the early release incentive made available to the majority of prisoners will result in “earnest” participation in programming, or whether it will be used by an advantageous prison population to scam an already-lenient sentencing system.
According to the DOC’s annual report, in 2024 there were some 6,700 DOC inmates (81 percent of all inmates) diagnosed with substance abuse disorder. Yet just under 25 percent of those inmates engaged in substance abuse treatment, and of those who did, 21 percent failed to successfully complete the treatment. At the same time there were 923 inmates with a diagnosed Serious and Persistent Mental Illness. The DOC engaged with these inmates nearly 2,100 times in an effort to complete Release and Reintegration planning yet were able to complete just 227 release plans with these prisoners.
This data demonstrates the difficulties associated with engaging our prison population in programming. The DOC is banking on the early release incentive to improve this. Conventional wisdom suggests that having even less time to engage with them is unlikely to produce better results.
As early release programs grow in popularity across the country, including at the federal level with the introduction of the First Step Act by the first Trump administration, it will become even more important to conduct a critical review of how these programs have affected recidivism, public safety, and overall reductions in criminal justice-related expenditures.
While there are numerous articles on the subject and plenty of examples of purported success, there seems to be a lack of analysis on the impact that the early release of large percentages of prisoners has on public safety over the long term. Nor do these analyses tend to evaluate the impact early releases have on victims and on society’s confidence in our criminal justice system to mete out appropriate punishment and prevent the insulting level of repeat offenders we have witnessed in recent years.
Kristin Derus Dore’s cousin, Steven Markey, was shot and killed by two offenders in 2019 during a carjacking in Minneapolis. The justice system utterly failed the Markey family. One of the offenders was released from custody after serving less than five years due to an absurd plea deal involving a reduced sentence in exchange for “intensive therapy.” Last summer, a month after his release, the killer was arrested after fleeing police in a stolen car and leading them on a multi-city chase exceeding 100 mph.
Derus Dore shared with me her assessment of the MRRA, explaining that as a family member of a murder victim, she found it “deeply disappointing” that our legislature would consider it appropriate that a prisoner serve just 50 percent of a sentence. Dore is not alone in her disappointment.
Who is exempt?
The only prisoners exempt from eligibility are those serving life sentences and prisoners with indeterminate sentences, such as those sentenced before 1993 or under the old “good time” system before 1980. “Good time” was a system where a prisoner could reduce the time served in custody by one day for every two days the prisoner followed prison rules and remained discipline-free.
The DOC estimates that nearly 7,400 inmates (out of 8,300 total) will be eligible for early release, and many thousands more on community supervision will be eligible for supervision abatement.
There has been concern over eligibility for early release by those convicted of crimes of violence. Led by Rep. Paul Novotny, the Republican Lead in the House Public Safety Finance and Policy Committee, a bill was put forward in 2024 to repeal the MRRA completely. The bill didn’t receive a hearing from the DFL-led committee.
In 2025, while sharing the chair in an evenly divided House, Rep. Novotny supported two additional bills related to the MRRA. The first proposed to remove the non-revokable status of the earned early release credit; the second proposed to exempt prisoners who had been convicted of crimes of violence from eligibility for early release. While both bills received a hearing, only the measure removing the non-revokable nature of the earned early release credit was included in the final public safety omnibus bill in 2025.
When does the MRRA take effect?
Although the law was passed in 2023, the DOC has been very deliberate in its implementation, utilizing a comprehensive two-year planning process to involve all stakeholders in drafting policies and preparing staff to carry out the program. For this, the DOC should be commended.
A pilot program involving a small group of prisoners began in the spring of 2025, and full implementation of the MRRA and early release incentive is set to begin in the fall of 2025.
How much will be saved or reinvested?
A significant selling point of the MRRA was the cost savings promised by the DOC.
First, the MRRA is designed to reduce costs by reducing the amount of time each of the eligible inmates serves in custody. Second, the goal of the MRRA is to reduce recidivism through incentivized participation in programming, and less overall crime would have a downstream impact on public safety costs.
Actual savings by housing prisoners for fewer months is the portion that will be “reinvested” back into the justice system and the general fund.
However, determining what that amount will be, or even what the DOC or the legislature estimates that amount will be, is unclear.
The legislative fiscal note attached to the bill totaled eight pages but failed to offer an estimated cost savings. Instead, the fiscal note indicated, “The Department of Corrections assumes that there will be a decrease in state correctional spending as a result of this bill; however, this impact is indeterminate.”
There were various media reports attributing an estimated $10 million per year cost savings to the governor’s budget, but locating the actual attribution of this estimate has proven difficult.
I reached out to DOC Commissioner Paul Schnell for clarification on goals and estimates involving the MRRA.
Schnell responded, in writing, that the DOC had “no goal as to the number of currently incarcerated individuals or supervised releasees that will participate in MRRA-related earned release or supervision abatement opportunities.”
Furthermore, Schnell was unable to offer an estimate of the savings the DOC hoped to realize through MRRA, offering only the mathematical equation of multiplying prison bed days saved by the “marginal per diem cash costs.”
He also informed me that the DOC had no specific estimate or goal for the impact it hoped the MRRA would have on recidivism. However, he referenced the success the DOC has had with its long-running Challenge Incarceration Program (CIP), which also has an incentivized early release component.
CIP is a voluntary boot camp-style program for a limited number of nonviolent offenders who have less than 48 months remaining of their sentence. CIP has reduced reimprisonment for CIP participants by 40 percent and re-arrest for a new offense by 51 percent.
While those reductions are encouraging, the differences between the CIP and MRRA are vast. Specifically, the MRRA will be statutorily available to the overwhelming majority of prisoners, while the CIP has a limited enrollment and is based on a 16-hour per day intensive boot camp format. There is no reasonable belief that the MRRA will garner the same results as the CIP.
The purpose of punishment
Academics agree that there are four main purposes that punishment serves: retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation. I assert that incapacitation is essential to the success of the other three purposes.
When the justice system fails to incapacitate criminal offenders, it weakens the system’s own ability to deliver justice for victims (retribution), to dissuade people from criminal activity (deterrence), or to offer adequate time to correct behavior patterns (rehabilitation).
Given the average Minnesota pronounced prison sentence in 2023 was just 55.9 months, cutting the already short prison time served in half results in actual prison time served of just over two years. Add to this the practice of applying “time served” for pretrial time spent in jail, and the ever-growing percentage of sentences that represent a downward “departure” from our sentencing guidelines, and the final average prison sentence is likely to fall below two years. As such, the value of incapacitation in Minnesota will be hopelessly weakened.
Why is this important? The data shows that as we have devalued incapacitation in Minnesota, we have experienced an increase in violent crime.
The figure above shows the trend lines of both our declining imprisonment rate and our rising violent crime rate in Minnesota.
When an estimated 1 percent of our population commits 60 percent of violent crime, it shouldn’t be considered controversial correctional policy to incapacitate those making up that 1 percent when they offend.
Takeaways and concerns
The DOC identified one of its most pressing problems as idle inmates not participating in programming. Instead of using the value of incapacitation to help incentivize these prisoners to improve themselves and their futures, the DOC and DFL lawmakers opted to offer early release as the primary incentive.
Offering early release encourages superficial participation rather than an earnest or genuine interest in self-improvement.
Veteran correctional officials often say that people will only change when they truly want to. Early release incentives often elicit a desire for early release, rather than a genuine motivation for lasting change. Instilling that motivation takes time, the kind of time realized through meaningful incapacitation.
While it can be said that current DOC efforts to engage inmates in programming aren’t as successful as they need to be, the MRRA represents a massive gamble involving thousands of state prisoners and those on community supervision — all while the DOC offers no clear expectations or goals regarding programming participation, reductions in recidivism, or cost savings.
If the gamble fails, it will be Minnesotans who pay the price — not only in overall costs associated with rising crime, but with a reduction in our collective quality of life.
When something isn’t working well, a willingness to try a different approach is often admirable. For that, the DOC should be commended. However, early release feels like the wrong approach at the wrong time.
In 2024 Minnesota’s imprisonment rate stood at 144.5/100,000, less than half the national average of 323/100,000, while other estimates set our community supervision rate at 2,092/100,000, versus a national average of 1,356/100,000.
The early release incentive represents a victory for social justice advocates who have been championing reduced prison populations for years. Further reductions in our prison population are inappropriate when we have consistently been among the states with the lowest incarceration rates and the highest community supervision rates in the nation.
The MRRA offered a chance to reset sentencing policy, making it more consequential. This would have allowed the DOC adequate time to engage prisoners and ensure they were ready for earnest self-improvement — an intriguing concept when the DOC estimates 95 percent of prison inmates will eventually return to their communities. Instead, the MRRA and its early release incentive will further weaken an already inconsequential correctional system. It seems unlikely the incentivization of “early release” provided for in the MRRA is the appropriate tool of choice to incentivize that earnest desire for self-improvement.