When it comes to incarceration rates, Minnesota stands out as one of the few states who is experiencing an increase in their prison population despite prison overcrowding and crime at a 50-year low. While there are multiple factors for this, a significant part of this increase is due to the incarceration of formerly released individuals for non-criminal “technical violations” of parole. According to the Department of Correction in 2017 alone, 3,391 people were returned to prison, yet 88 percent – or nearly 3,000 of those admissions – were a return without a new sentence, that is, for technical violations. A technical violation is a petty violation of supervised or conditional release (colloquially known as “parole”) which are not in themselves a misdemeanor or felony. For example, people can be violated for failure to obtain or maintain housing or employment, being late for or missing an appointment, going on social media, driving a vehicle and many other non-crimes.
