By: Jeff Beach
BISMARCK, N.D. (North Dakota Monitor) – North Dakota’s attorney general is backing a bill that will increase the time offenders spend behind bars because he says the state criminal justice system is releasing prisoners too quickly.
The head of the state’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation says the bill would deny prisoners access to treatment and education and lead to more repeat offenders. He argued spending more money on law enforcement would be a better use of taxes than locking up prisoners for longer periods of time when the state’s jails and prisons are already overcrowded.
Attorney General Drew Wrigley is pushing Senate Bill 2128, which he calls the truth-in-sentencing bill, as a way to reduce crime. The Senate passed the bill 28-18 despite a do-not-pass recommendation from the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The bill has a fiscal note that estimates the bill will cost the state $22.7 million in the 2025-27 biennium and $21.3 million for the following two years.
The House Judiciary Committee listened to nearly three hours of testimony on the bill Monday, beginning with Wrigley, who contends that the use of transition centers, or halfway houses, is essentially releasing prisoners long before their sentences are up.
The bill lists crimes where offenders would have to spend at least 50% of their sentence behind bars before being eligible for a halfway house.
Wrigley said the bill is not about longer sentences. “It’s about the sanctity of a judicial order,” Wrigley said, calling the correction’s department’s policies “misleading.”
He points to statistics from his office indicating 10 straight years of crimes against people rising across North Dakota.
Wrigley said offenders in halfway houses are routinely committing additional offenses and that the bill would not strip the corrections department of its ability to offer treatment and rehabilitation programs.
Braun invoked President Donald Trump, who in 2018, signed into law an act to provide more transition programs at the federal level. He said other states are also looking to North Dakota as a model, and reducing access to rehabilitation programs would be a step backward.
“The federal Bureau of Prisons is learning what we have known for years, that incentivizing behavior and programming while supporting people in their return to society increases public safety,” he said.
He said a third of the treatment programs completed by prisoners were done in a transition facility, which are private facilities that have a contract with the state to provide housing and services. Braun said the prison system does not have space or staff to absorb all the offenders who would not be eligible for a transition center under Wrigley’s bill.
The North Dakota State’s Attorney’s Association has not taken a position on the bill and state’s attorneys on both sides testified Monday.
Dennis Ingold, a Burleigh County assistant state’s attorney, and Ward County State’s attorney Rozanna Larson, were in favor of the bill.
Ingold says he primarily handles drug trafficking cases and is frustrated by seeing a criminal he prosecuted for a Class A felony back out in society after only about a month into a sentence.
Larson said she agreed with previous state policy changes to slow down the number of people going into North Dakota jails and prisons by reducing sentences on low-level crimes. But she said now she doesn’t feel like those changes are working.
“It’s not helping with the safety of our communities,” she said.
She said local governments have made big investments in jail space and the state will need to do so, also.
“Long term, we do have to have more space,” she said.
Cass County Assistant State’s Attorney Robert Vallie used to work with Larson in Ward County but was on the opposite side of the issue Monday.
He called Wrigley’s plan to fight crime with more prison time “seductively simplistic.”
He told the committee it was an issue worthy of a legislative study, rather than spending money on the attorney general’s plan with guarantee of success.
Travis Finck, executive director for the North Dakota Commission on Legal Counsel for Indigents, agreed that there is no evidence that longer sentences will work.
“If we’re really worried about crime increasing, … our money is better spent is by sending it to the men and women in uniform rather than building more prisons and bigger jails,” Finck said. “We know that works.”
Scott Peyton is the director of government affairs for a Virginia-based organization called Prison Fellowship. He testified that the longer prison sentences mandated nationally during the 1980s and ’90s did not have the desired effect.
“The unintended consequences of Senate Bill 2128 risk creating unnecessary barriers to successful reintegration, while failing to meaningfully enhance public safety,” he said.
Rep. Daniel Johnston, R-Kathryn, said it didn’t appear North Dakota’s corrections system was working particularly well and asked Peyton how it could work better.
Peyton referred to the attorney general’s crime statistics that showed a 43% clearance rate for violent crimes and property crimes.
“It’s a flip of the coin, whether you will be caught committing a crime,” Peyton said. “We know that the chance, the likelihood of being caught, is a greater deterrence than even longer sentences.”
Another aspect of the bill includes increasing penalties for people who flee from an officer or assault an officer. There were several uniformed officers attending the hearing.
Beulah Chief of Police Frank Senn said fleeing had become an epidemic in the state. Beulah is in Mercer County, where Sheriff’s Deputy Paul Martin was killed during a high-speed chase in 2023.
The committee did not act on the bill Monday.
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