Third piece in this section. Same rules as always: a named public dataset for every claim, every disparity with its denominator, the innocent explanation weighed first, and a fix a real office could carry out.
This one has a dataset and a rule book, and they say the same thing from opposite directions.
The number
Vera Institute's Incarceration Trends dataset compiles county jail figures from the federal jail surveys. For Minnesota in 2019, with 85 of 87 counties reporting, the average daily jail population was 6,874 people, and 4,700 of them — 68.4 percent — were held pretrial. Not serving a sentence. Awaiting the resolution of a charge.
That share has moved in one direction for a decade:
| Year | Jail population | Held pretrial | Pretrial share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 6,638 | 3,343 | 50.4% |
| 2013 | 6,632 | 3,824 | 57.7% |
| 2016 | 6,956 | 4,198 | 60.4% |
| 2019 | 6,874 | 4,700 | 68.4% |
The total held roughly flat. The composition changed. Minnesota did not jail dramatically more people over the 2010s; it shifted who was in the jail from the convicted to the not-yet-convicted. In 2010 a Minnesota jail was about half people serving time. By 2019 it was two-thirds people who had been proven nothing.
Who is in there
Same dataset, same year, rates per 100,000 residents aged 15 to 64, which is the denominator Vera uses:
| Group | Jail rate per 100,000 | Compared with white |
|---|---|---|
| White | 106.9 | — |
| Black | 684.5 | 6.4× |
| Latino | 266.9 | 2.5× |
| Native American | 1,255.0 | 11.7× |
| Asian American / Pacific Islander | 79.4 | 0.7× |
Read that last row before you decide what this table proves. Asian Minnesotans are jailed at a lower rate than white Minnesotans. A story in which the system simply falls on everyone who is not white does not survive that line. Whatever is happening here is not a uniform racial effect, and anyone selling it that way is not reading the table.
What the table does show is that the two groups at the top are the same two groups at the top of the felony sentencing rates in this section's first piece — Black Minnesotans at 6.2 times the white rate there and 6.4 times here, Native Minnesotans at 9 times there and 11.7 times here. The pretrial gap and the sentencing gap are the same gap, observed at two different moments in the same pipeline.
The rule that puts a price on the door
Here is the part most people, including most Minnesotans who have never been arrested, do not know.
Minnesota Rule of Criminal Procedure 6.02, subd. 1 tells a judge to release a defendant on personal recognizance or an unsecured bond unless release "will endanger the public safety or will not reasonably assure the defendant's appearance." If the judge makes that finding, the judge imposes the least restrictive conditions that will work — supervision, travel restrictions, a bond, or other conditions.
Then the rule adds this sentence: "The court must set money bail without other conditions on which the defendant may be released by posting cash or sureties."
Must. Not may. In Minnesota a defendant is entitled to a straight number — a pure cash figure that buys release with no conditions attached at all. No supervision, no check-ins, no travel limits.
Think about what that produces. Two defendants, same charge, same criminal history, same risk assessment. The judge sets conditional release plus an unconditional bail figure of, say, $10,000. The defendant with $10,000 posts it and walks out subject to nothing but a promise to appear. The defendant without it takes the conditions, or takes the jail cell.
The rule is not a loophole. It is a protection, and it was written as one: it guarantees that the state cannot hold you hostage to supervision terms you never agreed to. It also means Minnesota has written a wealth line directly into its release rules, and the line is doing exactly what a price does. Rule 6.02, subd. 2 even lists "financial resources" among the factors a court must weigh, which is candid about the fact that money is part of the calculation.
The state constitution has promised the front half of this since 1857. Article I, Section 7: "All persons before conviction shall be bailable by sufficient sureties, except for capital offenses when the proof is evident or the presumption great." Bailable. The promise is that you can buy your freedom back. It says nothing about what happens to people who cannot.
The honest complications
Minnesota is not a national outlier in volume. The overall jail rate here in 2019 was about 187 per 100,000 residents 15 to 64, well below national figures for the same period. This is not a state that jails everyone. That makes the composition finding sharper, not weaker: a comparatively restrained system still runs two-thirds pretrial.
Some pretrial detention is exactly right. The rule's standard is public safety and appearance, and there are defendants for whom the answer is detention. Nothing here argues otherwise. The question is not whether anyone should be held. It is whether the people being held are being held for danger or for insolvency, and the rules as written do not force anyone to answer that.
The data has a real ceiling. Full statewide coverage in this dataset ends in 2019. The 2020 and 2021 figures reflect pandemic releases. For 2022 and 2023 only about 15 Minnesota counties appear, so the apparent 62 to 66 percent pretrial share in those years is a partial picture and I am not treating it as statewide. Everything above is 2019 or earlier.
What I could not verify, and will not assert
I could not obtain current statewide Minnesota pretrial data. The Judicial Branch's site was unreachable during this research pass, as it was for the fines and fees article. I have no data on how often Minnesota judges set unconditional bail figures, at what amounts, how often those amounts are posted, or how any of that varies by county, offense, or race. I do not know the median length of pretrial stay. I have not verified whether the 2010–2019 trend continued after the pandemic. The disparity ratios above are jail-population rates, not a measurement of judicial decisions, and they cannot separate arrest patterns from charging patterns from release decisions. Anyone with the current numbers should send them and I will publish them.
What we can do
1. Enforce the rule that already exists. Rule 6.05 says the court "must supervise a defendant's detention to eliminate all unnecessary detention," and requires every detention facility to report to the prosecutor and the court, at least every two weeks, everyone held more than ten days on a felony or gross misdemeanor and more than two days on a misdemeanor. That reporting requirement is already law. Nobody sees the reports. Require them to be filed with the State Court Administrator in a standard format and published in aggregate — by county, by offense level, by length of stay. It creates no new obligation on anyone. It makes an existing one visible.
2. Make inability to pay a finding, not an assumption. When a court sets an unconditional cash figure, require it to state on the record whether it believes the defendant can post it. If the answer is no, the court has not set bail; it has ordered detention, and it should have to say so and justify it under the public-safety standard the rule already contains. Keep the defendant's right to the unconditional number. Add the court's duty to be honest about what the number does.
3. Use the misdemeanor clock. Rule 6.06 already says that if an in-custody defendant's misdemeanor trial has not begun in ten days, the defendant "must be released subject to nonmonetary release conditions." Pair that with the Rule 6.05 two-day reporting trigger and you have a working ceiling on misdemeanor pretrial detention that requires no new statute at all — only somebody whose job is to watch it.
4. Publish, and rejoin the count. Minnesota's disappearance from the national jail survey after 2019 is why this article ends at 2019. A state cannot manage what it refuses to count, and it cannot argue about bail reform without the numbers. Full county participation in the federal jail survey, plus an annual public pretrial report, is a small ask with a large payoff for every side of this debate.
The Minnesota Constitution says you are bailable. The rules say the judge must name your price. The data says two-thirds of the people in our jails have not been convicted of anything, and that the two groups least able to pay are the two groups most likely to be sitting there. None of those three sentences is in tension with the others, and that is the problem.
First the facts. Then the fix.
Sources
Vera Institute of Justice, Incarceration Trends county-level dataset (incarceration_trends_county.csv, downloaded from the project's public repository on Sept. 8, 2026), filtered to Minnesota: total jail population, total pretrial custody, and jail population and resident population aged 15–64 by race, aggregated across reporting counties. Coverage: 85 of 87 counties for 2019, 84 for 2018, 76 for 2010. Rates computed as jail population divided by resident population aged 15–64, times 100,000; ratios are those rates divided by the white rate. Minnesota Rules of Criminal Procedure, Rule 6, as published by the Minnesota Revisor of Statutes (verified verbatim, Sept. 8, 2026): Rule 6.02, subd. 1, including "A person charged with an offense must be released without bail when ordered by the prosecutor, court, or any person designated by the court," the release standard "will endanger the public safety or will not reasonably assure the defendant's appearance," the enumerated conditions, and "The court must set money bail without other conditions on which the defendant may be released by posting cash or sureties"; Rule 6.02, subd. 2, listing the factors a court must consider, including "(e) financial resources"; Rule 6.05, "The court must supervise a defendant's detention to eliminate all unnecessary detention," with bi-weekly detention-facility reporting for prisoners held more than ten days in felony and gross misdemeanor cases and more than two days in misdemeanor cases; Rule 6.06, requiring release "subject to nonmonetary release conditions" if an in-custody defendant's misdemeanor trial does not begin within ten days. Minnesota Constitution, article I, section 7 (verified verbatim at revisor.mn.gov): "All persons before conviction shall be bailable by sufficient sureties, except for capital offenses when the proof is evident or the presumption great." Felony sentencing rate comparisons from the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission's 2024 Sentencing Practices, as reported in this section's first article.
Full statewide coverage in the Vera dataset ends with 2019; 2020–21 reflect pandemic releases and 2022–23 include roughly 15 Minnesota counties, so no post-2019 statewide figure is asserted. No data was obtained on how often Minnesota courts set unconditional money bail, in what amounts, how often it is posted, or median length of pretrial stay; the Minnesota Judicial Branch's site was not reachable during this research pass. Jail-population rates measure who is in custody, not judicial release decisions, and cannot separate arrest and charging patterns from bail outcomes. Vera's race categories and its 15–64 population denominator are used as published. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.