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Featured Blogs
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. [...]
Meet our new Community Engagement Specialist Ronnie Waters
Ronnie Waters was just 17 years old when he stood before a judge for his sentencing. Waters knew what was coming, so he told his mother to stay home to spare her from hearing it. [...]
From prosecuted to working for the prosecutor’s office: A story of continuing transformation
Former juvenile lifer Edward Sanders starts work for Washtenaw County's Conviction Integrity & Expungement Unit (Safe & Just Michigan first interviewed Edward Sanders, a former juvenile lifer, in July 2018, after he had [...]
Citizens for Prison Reform releases report on solitary confinement
In 2014, Sabrie Alexander suffered more than 100 seizures over the period of two days. She and her family already knew that she had a seizure disorder, so normally, they would have rushed her to [...]
The Michigan Department of Corrections by the numbers
The Michigan Department of Corrections has released its 2019 Statistical Report, offering a glimpse into Michigan’s corrections system shortly before the COVID-19 crisis took hold and brought about some significant changes. Some of those changes [...]
Bailing on Cash Bail
For those who don’t have money, they are stuck in jail, trying to fight their case and hold their lives together with a crazy glue made out of incapacitation, restricted access to a telephone, [...]
Second Try at First-Offense Drunk Driving Expungement
2020 was a phenomenal year for criminal justice reform in Michigan, with everything from Clean Slate to the jails task force bills making their way into law. Amid all those victories, however, was one bitter [...]
Committees of Michigan’s 101st Legislature: Gatekeepers of the Capitol
January is the start of Michigan’s 101st Legislature, which will run through the years of 2021-2022. Since the entire House stood for election last year while the Senate did not — its members face re-election [...]