This is the second story in the Overrepresented, Undercounted series.
While Indigenous people represent around 1% of the state’s population, they represent 9.4% of the adult prison population in Minnesota, and about the same rate across all jails in the state, according to information from the Minnesota Department of Corrections and the nonprofit Institute for Justice.
KAXE is exploring the underlying issues of the statistics through survey outreach, extensive research and in-person interviews.
The project was made possible by a grant from the journalism nonprofit Poynter.
Read the first story: "Mental health, poverty tied to incarceration disparities for Indigenous Minnesotans"
CASS LAKE — Getting arrested and going to jail can get expensive.
For those who are already in poverty or disproportionately find themselves ensnared in the criminal justice system, the costs of bail, representation, probation or parole, fines, commissary and communication add up quickly. And the ripple effects only compound the issue: losses of jobs, housing, transportation — or all three.
Nearly all respondents to a KAXE survey conducted this spring pointed to these losses as serious impacts of incarceration of themselves or a loved one. The survey exploring these impacts garnered 32 responses, 14 of whom identified as either enrolled tribal members of descendants.
One respondent, who estimated financial impacts of incarceration to be more than $100,000, said entangling with the criminal justice system costs more than dollars.
“Reentry is harder than people think — finding housing and jobs is a constant struggle,” they said. “It created trauma that we’re still working through.”
Other expenses reported in the survey included letter writing and postage costs, buying phone cards for incarcerated people, money sent for commissary or canteen and travel costs — both for in-person visits at jails or prisons or to maintain probation and parole requirements.
“Maintaining relationships becomes very difficult. Communication is limited, expensive, and often stressful,” a KAXE survey respondent noted when asked about the impacts of incarceration on their family.
“Our kids suffered the most — emotionally, in school, and in how they see themselves,” another respondent noted.
Several of the survey respondents estimated total financial impacts from incarceration were in the tens of thousands.
One respondent commented that they could only describe the financial impacts as “just a lot.”
“After years on and off ... as a child, it happening to my older family member, to me being targeted ... a lot. I honestly can't put an amount on it.”
Fighting for a ‘fair shake’
For those who can afford it, a criminal charge could mean shelling out thousands of dollars for a private attorney.
But for most people, it means a court-appointed public defender representing them against the state.
“Nobody's better off being involved in criminal justice,” said James Hughes, executive director of Regional Native Public Defense Corp. “People who are coming into the criminal justice system, by and large, are not coming into the system because they're bad actors by themselves.”
The Regional Native Public Defense Corp., founded in 2007, got its start as a collaboration between White Earth and Leech Lake to serve tribal members living near those reservations and soon expanded to provide criminal defense services to Native people of any federally recognized tribe in its service area.
Native people who are charged with a crime can apply to be represented if they qualify for a public defender, and the nonprofit staff said it offers a different approach to the system.
“You're not ‘a fifth-degree drug case.’ ... You’re not ‘stealing from Walmart.’ You’re a person. You're somebody's son. You're somebody's daughter. You're somebody's mom, dad, brother, sister, grandson,” Hughes said.
“The more you do to detract or diminish a person's value in society, the more you do to diminish justice.”James Hughes, executive director of Regional Native Public Defense Corp.
“Being able to respect and appreciate a person for who they are gives us, I think, a little more latitude not to treat criminal defense as a transaction, but more as a relationship.”
Hughes said the disparities in the criminal justice system may be heavily influenced by perceptions about race, culture and poverty.
"When you've got the ability to differentiate a tribal member from a non-tribal member — oftentimes by the color of somebody's skin or by the license plate that's on the car they drive — it further makes them available to system actors who would prefer not to give a fair shake.”
Hughes and Thomas Sorenson, the organization’s community outreach and programs coordinator, sat down at their office in Cass Lake to discuss the statistics showing Native people overrepresented in the criminal justice system.
The office, in the heart of Cass Lake, was recently remodeled thanks to a Blandin Foundation grant. The reception area features a comfortable sitting room, with children’s activities as well as brochures detailing community events in Bemidji, Cass Lake and elsewhere across the organization’s service area.
“I think there's a lot of things other than just the court process that people are going through when they're going through the criminal justice system,” Sorenson said.
"Whether that's substance abuse, mental health or even transportation in a rural community, I think it's important to look at all the issues that people are dealing with when trying to help them navigate and find a better life and stability.”
The organization provides criminal defense services to Native people in part of Minnesota’s 9th Judicial District: Beltrami, Cass, Clearwater, Itasca and Mahnomen counties.It’s one of four nonprofit public defender offices recognized by the Minnesota Board of Public Defense and one of two that specifically cater to Native clients.
“Generally, what we see is they're already in a bad situation, whether it's through addiction or through repetition of cycles of violence and poverty and bull**** that have been imposed on them from the generation before,” Hughes said.
Above and beyond the criminal justice system, everyone has the same basic needs, he added
“People need to be respected. They need to have basic resources: food, clothing, shelter, love and companionship,” he said. “The more you do to detract or diminish a person's value in society, the more you do to diminish justice.”
The vast majority of people charged with a crime are represented by court-appointed public defenders, between 85-90%. High turnover, burn-out and pay disparity compared to prosecutors for public defenders have been studied since the 1963 Gideon case.
The nonprofit Vera Institute writes that since 2024, all states provide some level of funding for public defense offices, but the level of funding can vary widely and can be subject to state or local budget decisions.
“Indigent defense systems across the country have been chronically under-resourced for decades — a stark contrast to the far more robust resources often afforded to prosecutor’s offices,” Vera reports. “This disparity provides prosecutors with extraordinary power within the U.S. criminal justice system and often shifts outcomes in their direction. The threat of mandatory minimums and the horrors of pretrial detention can make people feel they have no choice but to accept whatever plea deal a prosecutor offers.”
In 2023, the Minnesota Legislature gave a bipartisan boost to the Minnesota Public Defense Board’s budget, helping avoid the first-ever strike fthat would have effectively halted the criminal justice system. The raise brought salaries in line with those of prosecutors.
Public defenders generally don't refuse cases, and their caseloads can be staggering. In Minnesota's 9th Judicial District, Hughes said the average caseload for a public defender is around 460 case units per year. That doesn’t necessarily mean the number of cases — a case unit is a measure of case complexity.
"Every case is worth a certain amount of unit credit, right? A run-of-the-mill misdemeanor is one unit,” Hughes explained. “The more serious the case is, the more enhanced the unit value gets. Homicide or a serious criminal sexual conduct case could be five units.”
With its staff of three full-time attorneys and two office supports, Hughes said the Regional Native Public Defense Corp. represented about 1,100 case units last year.
“Here, we're running about two-and-a-half attorneys worth of case units on an annual basis,” Hughes said.
Lighter caseloads have permitted the organization’s attorneys to dive deeper to better defend its clients, Hughes said, as well as take a more holistic approach to criminal defense.
Part of Sorenson’s outreach work is connecting clients with resources, including arranging mental health treatment, bringing a change of clothes to a treatment facility or facilitating family visits.
"There's just so many things that cause people to continue to stay in the criminal justice system or make them enter the system,” Sorenson said. “Whether that's historical trauma of not having parents around, because their grandparents were in boarding schools or just not having a home to go to.”
Among Indigenous respondents to the KAXE survey, the ages at which they were first impacted by incarceration trended much younger than non-Indigenous respondents.
One Indigenous respondent reported a parent or other caregiver was incarcerated when they were 11 years old, while many others reported experiencing incarceration, either of themselves or their close relatives, in their early teens.
“It was super hard as a child growing up in this area. Already being a minority, even though I am from here. The privileged people say we are not treated differently, but we are,” one Indigenous respondent wrote.
“No matter how much it is explained to people. They don’t and won't understand and honestly never will see anything through our lens. They don’t understand the generational trauma or the — still to this day — the racism I still experience in this area.”
Sorenson, who is of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa in Wisconsin, said he grew up in Bemidji and became involved in the criminal justice system himself as a youth.
“It just felt like it was so hard to get out of there,” he said.
Sorenson said he turned it around after participating in Bi-County Community Action Program’s YouthBuild, a construction skills program for students who left the K-12 system before graduation. He said he was motivated by the staff’s compassion and understanding and aims to provide the same to his clients.
“Having someone that cares,” he said. “I think that went a long way with me.”
Sorenson said community is prioritized over individualism in Native culture, families are strongly connected and qualities such as humor and pride are highly valued.
“Pride is a huge thing when it comes to finding a purpose,” Sorenson said, explaining it’s hard to find purpose “if you don't have a job, if you wake up every day just surviving.”
The DWI dragnet
Of the 2,578 arrests made in the Regional Native Defense Corp.'s service area in 2025, the most common reason was driving while intoxicated, according to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension's Crime Data Explorer.
Law enforcement officers and agencies are motivated to remove intoxicated drivers from Minnesota roads.
The state’s Department of Public Safety offers agencies multiple grants for reducing and preventing impaired driving, including funds for ignition interlocks and DWI courts, or dedicated officers to detect and arrest impaired drivers.
Law enforcement officers are often rewarded for their DWI enforcement efforts, like a Twins baseball night in their honor or receiving trophies and other recognition for being “DWI All-Stars.”
With DWI being a common way to get caught up in the criminal justice system, Hughes said he believes many of the laws on the books in the state create additional — and unnecessary — police encounters to seek out more DWI arrests.
“We're in a self-perpetuating system. The criminal defense world exists because prosecutors bring charges. Prosecutors bring charges because police bring them cases,” Hughes said. “Police bring them cases because they need to justify their existence.
“We've got law enforcement out there in some regards responding to true emergencies, but in other regards, there's police out there that are looking for encounters. They're generating encounters, and it's running the numbers out.”
Hughes pointed to a pattern of traffic stops for equipment and traffic violations that generate increased law enforcement encounters.
“I have no problem with the fact that they're out there doing the hard work. But the way the law works, the way the system works, it allows and incentivizes the type of enforcement that brings you there.”
Hughes said the disparity of Indigenous overrepresentation in the criminal justice system is created when law enforcement targets things that are indicative of poverty, rather than bad conduct.
While Natives make up about one-fifth of the population in Regional Native Public Defense Corp.’s service area, they made up nearly half of all arrests in 2025.
“Knick-knacking people for traffic violations or riding a bike after dark — OK, why are they riding a bike after dark? They don't have a car, right?” he said. “The poor are generally easy pickings. The fact that they have to fight back in the first place is because they were easy pickings to get sucked into the system.”
Hughes noted that for drug DWI arrests, the presence of a drug in a person’s system can create an intoxicated driving charge, even if they were not under the influence at the time of the encounter. In sober driving campaigns, the DPS warns driving while intoxicated can cost people thousands of dollars.
“Let's start responding to emergencies instead of creating problems,” Hughes said. “But until you get that change, we're playing the cyclical cat and mouse game.”
Cash bail and pretrial detention
If one is arrested and charged with a crime, making bail is necessary to avoid being held in jail before trial. But it’s often a matter of whether people can afford it.
“The law favors the release of defendants pending adjudication of charges. Deprivation of liberty pending trial is harsh and oppressive, subjects defendants to economic and psychological hardship, interferes with their ability to defend themselves, and, in many instances, deprives their families of support,” states the American Bar Association.
Minnesota is one of 41 states that has a right to bail enshrined in its state constitution. Historically, bail could be defined as promises from family members, neighbors and community figures for the accused to appear. But over the years, bail began to be measured in dollars.
“This transformation introduced a fundamental inequity into the system,” wrote the nonprofit Bail Project in a commentary coinciding with America’s 250th anniversary.
“When release depends on money, detention no longer reflects a considered judgment about safety or likelihood of return to court — it reflects a person’s financial circumstances. Those with means can secure their freedom, even when risk is present. Those without means remain behind bars, even if they pose no risk at all.”
A bill introduced late last legislative session sought a Minnesota constitutional amendment allowing the exploration of moving away from cash bail, the default in the criminal justice system.
Rep. Athena Hollins, a DFLer from St. Paul, introduced the measure in April. While it never saw a House floor vote in 2026, a state constitutional amendment may yet return in future sessions.
“For too long, people with wealth have been able to leverage cash bail to be able to buy their freedom,” Hollis said while introducing it.
“It also has collateral costs. When you jail a person who is the primary breadwinner for a family, that means there is a ripple effect to our community. That family may now be applying for food stamps or childcare assistance or a whole number of different things because the person who is usually providing for them is now jailed before even being proven guilty.”
Researchers with the Prison Policy Institute state people go to jail more than 7.6 million times a year across the United States.
In their “Mass Incarceration 2026: The Whole Pie” study, they write that while some make bail within hours or days, others remain in jail until their case is resolved.
“Only a small number, about 120,000 on any given day, have been convicted and are generally serving misdemeanor sentences of under a year,” the report read.
“At least one in four people who go to jail will be arrested again within the same year — often those dealing with poverty, mental illness, and substance use disorders, whose problems only worsen with incarceration.”
Hughes said in his own experience in Northern Minnesota, the “judge's mindset and your client's attitude and charges are going to have a whole lot more to do with whether a person sits in jail on a pre-trial basis than much of anything else.”
“When you talk about pre-trial detention and the amount of bail that gets set for people, there's no rhyme or reason to it,” Hughes said. “They've got these bail studies that are supposed to tell a court how risky a person is. It's bull****.”
Continuum of corrections
People who are convicted of crimes are often placed on probation or parole after serving their time in jail or prison.
“Most of the folks who come into our office will get convicted of something,” Hughes said. “It also means they're going to have probation imposed on them. They're going to have additional things to do or things not to do imposed on them by the courts.”
These court “to-dos” can include not entering bars or liquor stores; avoiding contact with any co-defendants, victims, or people who are using drugs or alcohol; remaining on psychiatric medication and more.
“If [people] are previously justice-involved, they probably got a pretty good idea,” Hughes said of probation or parole conditions. “They've got to go to treatment or get some anger management or get some counseling, get a job, pay a fine.”
Sorenson described some of his outreach work for the organization, detailing a collaborative network of providers within the community, such as the recovery peer support group in Bemidji, Face it Together, and other resources for their clients’ mental health and chemical dependency evaluations.
“Creating relationships with the community, organizations like Face it Together or Leech Lake Tribe, and just trying to find ways that we can collaborate and be out in the community more and for people to understand that we're here,” Sorenson said.
While Minnesota incarcerates its residents at a lower rate than other states, the Prison Policy Institute found the state ranks among the highest in the nation for placing people on correctional control via probation or parole.
The conditions of probation and parole can be another overlooked driver of mass incarceration, according to the Prison Policy Institute.
“If a parole or probation officer suspects that someone has violated supervision conditions, they can file a detainer or hold, rendering that person ineligible for release on bail,” the researchers write. “For people struggling to rebuild their lives after conviction or incarceration, returning to jail for a minor infraction can be profoundly destabilizing.”
Despite its many challenges, Sorenson and Hughes said they find their work in nonprofit criminal defense rewarding.
"There's amazing things happening in the community with the drug courts, DWI courts, the People's Church,” Sorenson said. The People’s Church is a nondenominational faith-based resource and shelter for people experiencing homelessness and hunger.
"Collaboration is a huge thing when trying to solve some of these issues,” he added.
Hughes said that the 2023 changes to Minnesota law have had a positive effect on his workload.
After 2023, possessing drug paraphernalia can no longer lead to fifth-degree drug possession charges, and with the statewide legalization of marijuana, cannabis prohibition laws were also taken off the books.
He said there are still too many laws, but there are local and state officials that can act to reduce legal encounters.
"The Legislature can fix that. [The Bemidji] City Council can fix that. They can tell the Bemidji police, 'You're not stopping people anymore for having a cracked taillight ... or if they didn't signal 100 feet before a turn,’” he said. “Go respond to actual crime, go respond to actual public safety issues. Perhaps there's better ways for law enforcement to direct their attention.”
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Contributed/via InciWebNearly 9,000 acres are estimated to be burning in the BWCA as of July 13, 2026, and the closure is for public safety. The Boundary Waters is not expected to fully reopen this summer. -
Lorie Shaull/Special to KAXESevere drought is present in at least 11% of Minnesota and another 18% is in moderate drought. The drought conditions are mostly seen in Northern Minnesota. -
Contributed/RDNE Stock project via PexelsPrairie Pines Childcare Center, the Northland Foundation and the Northwest Minnesota Foundation were awarded grants from the state Department of Employment and Economic Development. -
Even with green plants and recent rainfall, large portions of the Northland are classified as in moderate or severe drought. -
And: Four Northland organizations recieve child care grants; men encouraged to wear sunscreen and get skin checks; and Eveleth plans to replace the "Big Stick."
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Contributed/InciWebThe U.S. Forest Service is also banning campfires amid dry conditions. The closures and campfire ban go into effect July 11, 2026. -
And: Minnesota partners hope opioid prevention success spreads to youth; and a community storytelling initiative aims to capture recovery stories in St. Louis County.
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Contributed/Koochiching Soil and Water Conservation DistrictThe plan will guide the implementation of voluntary conservation projects and programs in the northeastern Minnesota watershed over the next decade. -
Contributed/Towfiqu barbhuiya via PexelsA foundation coordinating with local partners says the opioid crisis isn't over, and a new Minnesota grant is an example of the urgency felt in preventing youth tragedies. -
Contributed/Tom Neustrom Fishing Promotions Facebook PageThe Grand Rapids area fishing guide and former Itasca County deputy died in his home on July 5, 2026. He contributed to the Minnesota fishing community in numerous ways.
