Mandatory Minimums Don’t Deter Crime. It’s Time to Reconsider the Practice.

By Mark Osler, Robert and Marion Short Professor of Law, University of St. Thomas

Mandatory minimum sentences—legislatively fixed prison terms that a judge must impose upon conviction for certain offenses—have long been controversial within criminal law. They have been shown to drive racial disparities and, in some cases, such as the federal narcotics scheme, result in disturbingly long sentences for relatively minor behavior. The justification for these mandatory minimums is often deterrence: that if people know they face a mandatory sentence, they will choose not to violate the law. Though deterrence is hard to measure on a large scale, the logic of deterrence requires that two things be true: that those thinking about committing a crime know about the potential mandatory sentence, and that they then decide the benefits outweigh the costs.

It is unlikely that either of these predicates for deterrence is achieved in mandatory minimum schemes, and the broad research shows failure. For example, beginning in the 1980s, mandatory sentences were created in narcotics laws around the country, but drugs continued to proliferate, and overdose deaths rose while the street price of narcotics (the best metric of law enforcement success) either stayed flat or actually declined.

In its 2025 session, the Minnesota legislature created a task force to advise them on reforms to the state’s mandatory minimum laws. After a year of work, that task force has issued a comprehensive report that recommends several actions, including the following:

• Reforming the statute that determines these sentences (MN 609.11) by replacing mandatory minimums for gun use and possession with a six-tier penalty enhancement scheme built into the sentencing guidelines.

• Eliminating eight felony drug offenses from the list of “crimes of violence” that enhance sentences and trigger mandatory minimums. Those eight offenses are non-violent and have maximum penalties of five years or less.

• Eliminate the mandatory minimum for first violations of predatory offender registration requirements. 

• Allow both the defendant and the prosecutor to move for a waiver of some mandatory minimum sentences.
  

The Minnesota Justice Research Center has had three significant roles in the creation and work of the task force. First, the bill to create the task force was a part of the MNJRC-affiliated Justice For All coalition’s slate in 2025. Second, three people with long-standing ties to MNJRC (myself, Rob Stewart, and Mark Haase) served on the task force. Finally, the MNJRC was enlisted to conduct a qualitative study to gather and report input from victims of crime, victims’ family members, individuals directly impacted by mandatory minimums, and family members of those directly impacted. They also conducted a mixed-methods survey of people who work in the criminal legal system, including defense attorneys and prosecutors.

The MNJRC study came to some fascinating conclusions that deserve consideration beyond Minnesota. First, they found that individuals across all surveyed groups had limited awareness of the existence of mandatory minimums, undermining the argument that they serve a deterrent purpose (because people can’t be deterred from crime by a fact they don’t know). Practitioners broadly viewed mandatory minimums as poor deterrents; even 83% of prosecutors considered them ineffective at deterring crime.

Second, the study found that justice-impacted individuals, victims, and practitioners commonly saw mandatory minimums as reshaping the process away from both engagement with victims and individualized consideration of those convicted of crimes. 

Third, and finally, the studies found that the impacts of mandatory minimums landed far beyond the person sentenced, leaving innocent family members of those incarcerated facing lost income, housing instability, and family trauma. 

Incarceration, of course, inevitably creates those human costs. Taken together with the ineffectiveness of those mandatory sentences at achieving their primary goal of deterrence, though, it is difficult to justify so much harm. We are a freedom-loving people; we should deny freedom only when necessary to solve a problem, and this research confirms that, at least, some of the mandatory minimums in the Minnesota scheme do not meet that standard. 

The task force’s report is at the request of and directed to the legislature. In the 2027 legislative session, they will have the chance to act. Hopefully, they will hear from those who care about criminal justice in service of true public safety and evidence-based problem-solving rather than imagined deterrence.

Read the full report here and learn more about MNJRC's community engagement here.

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Mark Osler is the Robert and Marion Short Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas. He also holds the Ruthie Mattox Preaching Chair at First Covenant Church, Minneapolis. A former federal prosecutor, he focuses his research and writing clemency, sentencing and narcotics policy.