How Minnesota's laws land differently by race, income, age, disability, and geography
Photo: Dave Madgett • Grand PortageState agency tables, court records, Census and BLS files, sentencing data. Linked, so you can check the work.
A disparity is a rate, not a count. Every one is stated per 100,000, per capita, or as a share of the population it is drawn from.
Offense mix, geography, age, income. If a gap has a benign cause, it gets said before anything else does.
No manufactured outrage. Each piece ends with a concrete reform, scaled to what an Attorney General or the Legislature can actually do.
The Sentencing Guidelines Commission's own 2024 tables: 1,243 Black adults sentenced per 100,000, against 201 white; American Indians at 1,809. Yet at the sentencing hearing, judges cut prison time below the guideline more often for Black defendants than white ones. The disparity is built upstream, in who gets charged and in the guideline grid itself. What the numbers show, what they can't, and what to change.
Read →Fines, fees, and the $75 surcharge (who a flat fee actually falls on) • Cash bail and who sits in jail before trial • Homestead and debtor exemptions (who loses the car and the wildcard) • Where the license-plate cameras are placed • Long-term-care closures by county • School funding and reading outcomes by district and income • Medical-debt protections, who they reach and who falls through.
Have a dataset that belongs here? campaign@madgettformn.com