Throughout the week, Michigan's lawmakers have been hard at work finalizing a state budget for next year. That budget is now complete, and it has some promising implications for people working for criminal justice reform. This budget season, Safe & Just Michigan and partner organizations throughout the state embarked on a campaign to provide much-needed [...]
Michigan’s prison population nudged upward again for the first time in a decade, reversing a trend of rapidly falling headcounts inside prisons operated by the Michigan Department of Corrections. According to the figures recently published in the MDOC’s 2022 Statistical Report, there were 32,374 people incarcerated in Michigan prisons at the end of 2022, up [...]
Think twice before demanding Bernstein resignation There’s no mistaking Michigan Supreme Court Justice Richard Bernstein’s Freudian Slip objection to newly appointed Justice Kyra Bolden’s hiring ex-felon Pete Martel as one of her law clerks as racism, bigotry, or discrimination. But calls for Bernstein’s resignation are unwarranted because his outburst isn’t reflective of the “blind justice” [...]
On Thursday, Jan. 12 — the second day of the new session — the incoming Democratic majorities in the Michigan House and Senate announced committee assignments. For those of us interested in criminal justice issues, the focus is always the Judiciary committees, which handle the vast majority of criminal justice-related legislation. There is much to [...]
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 are visible in a subsequent report to the Michigan Legislature in a January 2021 Budget Briefing document that detail how [...]
Each year, the Michigan Department of Corrections releases a factbook of statistics describing their department, the state prisons and the people who are incarcerated inside them. This year’s factbook, which looks at statistics from 2018, was recently released. Overall, the facts and figures point to continuing trends: Michigan’s prison population continues to fall, while our [...]
Michigan doesn’t have the death penalty, but that doesn’t mean people don’t die in our state’s prisons. In 2017 alone, 106 people died while they were incarcerated in Michigan, according to the Michigan Department of Corrections’ Statistical Report. Many of them were receiving treatment for medical conditions. Things like cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and the advanced [...]
The Michigan Department of Corrections released its 2017 Statistical Report on Jan. 23, 2019. It releases statistical reports annually, and each year they contain hundreds of pages of facts, figures, charts and tables that help paint the picture of Michigan’s criminal justice system. The information covers topics such as how many people are newly sentenced [...]
The Michigan House of Representatives has a new speaker this session, Rep. Lee Chatfield (R-Levering), and he has announced that the House committee process will work slightly differently this session than it has in previous years. Until now, bills were sent to any number of standing House committees. Each of these committees had the ability [...]
Both chambers of the Michigan Legislature have appointed members to their committees for the 2019-20 legislative session. These committees are an important part of the legislative process because they act as gatekeepers as bills make their way through the legislative process. Each year, thousands of bills are introduced to the Michigan Legislature by our lawmakers. [...]