I speak on Indigenous incarceration and recidivism. Before I ask a room to listen, I hold myself to the same standard I hold this business: proof. So we went and got Minnesota's own numbers — not national talking points, not somebody else's talking points at all. The state's own reports. Here is what they say.
American Indian adults in Minnesota are arrested at 4.6 times the rate of white adults, and imprisoned at 15.1 times the rate. That is the CSG Justice Center's Minnesota snapshot, built on FBI data for 2023.
We are about one percent of Minnesota's population. On January 1 of this year, American Indian people were 766 of the 8,160 people in Minnesota prisons — 9.4 percent, by the Department of Corrections' own count. American Indian women are 20 percent of the women in this state's prisons.
The counties tell it sharper. In Beltrami County, Native people are 21 percent of the residents and 68 percent of the jail. In Cass County — Leech Lake country — 11 percent of the residents, 58 percent of the jail. Those are Vera Institute figures, and the state has never disputed them.
What drives it is not a mystery. It is mechanics. Fifty-six percent of everyone sitting in a Minnesota jail is there pretrial — accused, not convicted. From 2017 to 2022, seventy percent of the people arrested on outstanding warrants in Beltrami County were American Indian, per the sheriff's own data. And American Indian felony probationers carry the highest revocation rate in Minnesota — 26.3 percent, the highest of any group, in every offense type and every judicial district in the state, per the Sentencing Guidelines Commission. A revocation is not a new crime. It is a trip back through the door on a technicality.
Then there is the number that does not exist. Minnesota has never published a recidivism rate for American Indian people. Not rearrest, not reconviction, not reincarceration — nothing, in any Department of Corrections report or study we could find. For Mahnomen County and Red Lake County, the state's systems hold no Native jail data at all. The Department of Corrections has an official policy committing it to work with tribal governments to lower American Indian recidivism. It has never published the rate it is trying to lower. You cannot fix what you refuse to count.
What works is also in the record. In 2006, Cass County and the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe built the first joint tribal–state jurisdiction court in the United States — the Healing to Wellness Court — and a joint pretrial program that cut the county jail's average daily population from 54 to 35 between 2022 and 2024. When the tribe is at the table, the numbers move.
This is why I make the music I make. This is why I stand in front of rooms. The numbers are not the whole story — no number is a person — but they are the floor the story stands on, and now they are on the record, sourced, for anyone who wants to check them.
Make Some Noise. Make a Difference.
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