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Featured Blogs
Meet Safe & Just Michigan’s New Senior Research Specialist Cassie Larrieux
Cassie Larrieux is comfortable with data. She can talk about ratios and intervals or qualitative and quantitative information like most people can talk about what was on television last night or who won the big [...]
Meet Safe & Just Michigan’s New Grants Manager Cecilia Zavala
When Cecilia Zavala was a girl growing up in Detroit, she dreamed of one day dressing up in suits and going to work downtown, where she’d have a job as “the boss.” Becoming a mother [...]
Why Restoring Good Time is Good Policy
For most of its history, Michigan had a generous, progressive “good time” system that reduced a prisoner’s parole eligibility date for every month they did not receive a citation for misconduct. (See: Barbara Levine, Citizens [...]
A Day in the Life of a Community Engagement Specialist
One of the most rewarding things about working for criminal justice reform is getting people interested in transforming our court and prison systems and watching the momentum for change build, both in Michigan and nationwide. [...]
What Caused Michigan’s Prison Population to Fall 12% in One Year?
Michigan’s prison population dropped by a drastic 11.7% between 2019 and 2020, driven by an effort to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Michigan Department of Corrections 2020 Statistical Report. While Gov. Gretchen Whitmer [...]
Meet our new Social Media Specialist Ashley Bellant
It was at a young age that Ashley Bellant was introduced to the idea of organizing. Having come from generations of Michigan automotive workers, some of her earliest memories are dinners at the union hall [...]
How Inflation Is Making It Easier to Be Charged With Some Felonies
A lot of attention lately has been given to the sudden rise in inflation and what that has done to consumer prices. A quick definition of inflation is the rising price of goods and services [...]
Help for incarceration-related childhood trauma
We have long understood that incarceration of a parent can be traumatizing for a child — something we know from both peer-reviewed research and anecdotal evidence. Sadly, 1 in 10 children in Michigan have experienced [...]
Meet new Clean Slate Program Manager Kamau Sandiford
One of the harder jobs Kamau Sandiford has ever had was telling people that Michigan’s expungement law didn’t allow them to expunge their criminal record. As the staff attorney of Cooley Law School’s Access to [...]
Get to know new Development Fellow Justin Counts
The words Justin Counts heard from a man in a prison hospice care shook him to his core and turned him in a new direction. “You don’t belong here,” the dying man said. For a [...]
Get to know Development Fellow Tamir Bell
In his 40 years, Tamir Bell has been a motherless child, a star pupil, a drug dealer, incarcerated and a community activist. But to truly understand him, you must look beyond all those labels. “It’s [...]
Juvenile Life with the Possibility of Parole
The age of 18 has long been recognized as the legal age of adulthood. That means it is the age at which a person has both the rights and responsibilities of adulthood under the law. [...]