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Featured Blogs
Meet Kimberly Woodson, our new Fund Development Fellow
Kimberly Woodson was almost locked away forever. We should all be grateful she wasn’t. Not only has she started a Detroit-based nonprofit to help others reintegrate into the community after coming home from prison, Safe [...]
Meet Scott Tompkins, our new Fund Development Fellow
Growth is carried out over the course of an entire lifetime. This is a concept that resonates well with Scott Tompkins. Over his lifetime, he has been a father, a journalist, an educator, a community organizer [...]
Meet our new social work intern Lucas Day
Lucas Day is still learning. A graduate from the Michigan State school of journalism and now a student pursuing a master’s degree in social work degree from MSU, Lucas has learned more through his interviews [...]
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 [...]