Whether under the stage lights of PBS’s “Almanac,” crammed into small debate venues or knocking on the front doors of homes across Minneapolis and its suburbs, Hennepin County Attorney candidates Cedrick Frazier and Anders Folk invariably face questions about juvenile justice.
Could a recent shooting outside of an Eden Prairie High School football game have been prevented with earlier intervention? What does justice look like for a teenager with mental health concerns accused of an armed carjacking?
“Juveniles and especially juveniles committing very serious offenses aren’t being held sufficiently accountable,” Folk said on “Almanac” in late September. He placed blame largely on the policies of outgoing Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty.
Frazier, the DFL-endorsed candidate in the race whose platform aligns more closely with Moriarty, acknowledges that some youth are committing serious crimes. But on the campaign trail, he has focused more explicitly on pathways for “the ones that haven’t committed any heinous crimes yet.”
The candidates’ discussions have often found their way to the Hennepin County Home School, a now-shuttered facility on 139 acres in Minnetonka. For decades, the facility housed as many as 150 juvenile offenders. Its population shrunk over the years, at one point getting down to only two residents. In the years leading up to its 2021 closure, it faced mounting criticisms, from high costs to outdated facilities.
Neither candidate has advocated for reopening HCHS, though Folk has come closer than Frazier. But the fact that it’s become part of the debates at all shows the anxiety that many still hold about youth crime and who’s best equipped to address it over the next four years.
Even before Moriarty took office, ideas about how best to handle juvenile offenders had been shifting across the country, said Josh Weber, director of the Council of State Governments’ juvenile justice program.
“Nationally, in the past two decades or so, youth arrests are down 75%, and youth arrests for violent offenses are down about 60%,” Weber said. “This has been a really long, persistent and significant trend.”
Those numbers cratered further during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said, before ticking back up slightly.
That pattern was clear in Hennepin County. In both 2018 and 2019, under Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman, the office dealt with more than 5,000 juvenile cases, according to available data. By 2021, still under Freeman, that number fell to 2,472. Case totals since then have ticked back up, hovering around 3,000 annually.
“Juvenile and criminal justice became a much more politically divisive issue because of both politics and some of those upticks,” Weber said.
Since Moriarty took office in 2023, about 41% of juvenile cases have led to charges while about 35% were referred to programs like Restorative Justice Community Action, The Link or NorthPoint Health and Wellness Center. Those nonprofits partner with the county to provide what’s called “pre-charge diversion” services.
Pre-charge diversions, which both candidates support to some degree, allow the accused to agree to a specific course of action, often involving counseling and conflict resolution work, rather than face life-altering criminal charges. Research has shown that well-run diversion programs can keep youth – especially first-time offenders – from reoffending.
Between 2018 and 2022, Freeman’s office charged roughly half of all juvenile cases that came before them. Their use of pre-charge diversion dropped from 31% of cases in 2018 to a low of 21% in 2021, though those figures were affected by a trend toward declining more cases overall.
Under Moriarty, several categories of crime have seen the biggest shifts away from charges for juveniles and toward pre-charge diversion. They include shoplifting, property damage, domestic violence and theft.
That shift is especially apparent in 2026, as pre-charge diversion has outpaced charges 46% to about 35%. The decisions are in line with the office’s new Policy on Youth Diversion, implemented in 2025 following a University of Minnesota study showing that successful pre-charge diversion results in a significantly lower likelihood to re-commit crime compared to other case outcomes.
“Research is really clear that incarcerating kids is not an effective public safety strategy,” Weber said. “That doesn’t mean that no kids should ever be detained or incarcerated.”
But, he added, kids who are incarcerated are more likely to reoffend and commit violent crimes, while being less likely to finish high school.
“The decision to involve kids in the juvenile justice system can change the entire trajectory of their life,” he said.
While pre-charge diversion strategies ideally keep youth from ever entering the criminal justice system, the discussions around the Hennepin County Home School signal that there’s still looming concern about where to send youth who are a risk to public safety or who need intensive care.
“I do think we need a real hard look at a third way,” Folk told MinnPost. That approach, he said, “needs to be more residential and something that may not be an exact replica of the county homeschool, but that provides an opportunity to get kids out of their neighborhoods, to get them education and rehabilitation, and to also be held accountable for violations of the law.”
Frazier has pushed back, saying the home school was ineffective. Still, HCHS’s closure, he said, put the county in a bind.
“We were left without an option to place young people if we have to remove them from their communities or from their homes, if they’re a threat to themselves or a threat to others. And I think that’s a big failure on our part to not have a plan.”
Frazier has expressed interest in a model currently in the planning stages in Ramsey County called Youth Healing and Treatment Homes. As opposed to a large and likely faraway facility like HCHS, the idea behind the model is to offer “home-like residences” operated by licensed providers who can offer full-time care near to the young person’s family and community.
Ramsey County received $10 million from the state in 2023 to get the homes going, but the process hit some early snags. The county currently says the homes are expected to open by the end of 2026. The chosen providers – Sanneh Foundation (in partnership with Generation 2 Generation) and The Link – will each offer six beds at their facilities.
Jeff Lunde was the mayor of Brooklyn Park for a decade before his election to the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners, where he serves as chair of the board’s Law, Safety and Justice Committee.
It was through that work that he became part of the state’s Working Group on Youth Interventions, tasked with reporting to the Legislature on the problems facing Minnesota’s out-of-home, post-adjudication facilities like HCHS.
In a 2024 report, the group concluded that the state had “inadequate data practices and outcome measurements,” and that communities across the state had need for facilities like triage centers, crisis stabilization units and residential treatment.
These recommendations, Lunde told me, were eerily similar to the “Juvenile Out-of-Home Placement” report from 1999.
“The working group found that most of the issues, barriers and gaps identified 25 years ago still exist today,” the 2024 report concluded. “However, the complexity of issues impacting Minnesota youth, especially mental and behavioral health needs, have increased.”
“The county homeschool was like a warehouse,” said Lunde, who has endorsed Folk. “It was one place for everybody. That’s why it wasn’t working.”
By the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the county was paying $9.7 million a year to house single-digit numbers of juveniles, he said. Judges had stopped sending kids there realizing it wasn’t “a facility for the future.”
That said, Ramsey County’s residential model faces challenges, too, he said. He questioned how Hennepin County, which will absorb a $27 million hit to its budget in 2027 due to federal and state funding shifts, could afford the model, which would require significant start-up costs.
Frazier asserted that with funding and some legislative changes around licensing rules, it could be a viable and effective option.
For now, Lunde said, Hennepin County’s new Youth Stabilization Center just south of downtown Minneapolis is a positive development. The $15 million center, focused on youth with mental and behavioral health needs who can’t safely be in their home, is serving about a dozen kids each day for stays of 30-45 days.
It came together relatively quickly, going from county board approval to a December 2025 opening in just 13 months. Throughout its planning, the county worked with community providers to create an optimal setting for kids who might otherwise have landed in, say, an emergency room – often the first thought for a frightened parent but not the best place to address behavioral struggles.
The center has met a critical and ongoing need: According to county records, the number of residential treatment beds fell by 36% following the pandemic, accompanied by a 31% increase in emergency room visits.
In debates, Folk has been fond of saying that the Mary Moriarty era will end when he takes office. Frazier has replied that Moriarty will be leaving the office no matter who is elected.
In either case, the best places to effect change, Weber said, will be at the edges of the system.
“Can we create alternative structures so that kids never get arrested in the first place,” he said, “and focus everyone’s time on the kids that are truly high risk and potentially will commit violent offenses?”
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