I walked into my first Day of Empathy event nearly four years ago feeling terrified, socially averse and embarrassed. I was ashamed and had been shamed. I had only recently completed my three years of incarceration and a bit more than two years of parole and probation. The memory of being paraded, in a bright [...]
Every year in mid-November, thousands of criminologists from around the world gather in a large U.S. city for the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology (ASC). ASC is the primary professional association for criminologists and other academics that study crime. This year, the conference took place in San Francisco, and the theme was [...]
In late October, presidential candidates and formerly incarcerated people came together in the historic Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia to discuss criminal justice reform. "Justice Votes 2020: A Presidential Town Hall" was a joint effort of several organizations, such as Voters Organized to Educate (VOTE) and The Marshall Project, and was live streamed via NowThis. [...]
This is the third in a series of blogs related to understanding who is incarcerated in Michigan prisons, why they are incarcerated, and for how long. The first post looked at some of the demographics of our prison population. In the second blog, which took a look changing size of our prison population, we ended [...]
On Sept. 9, a bipartisan group of state lawmakers introduced Clean Slate legislation to Michigan. If passed, this legislation will be crucial in helping people who have a criminal record and who have lived crime-free for years. This package of legislation would increase the number of these people who would become eligible for an expungement, [...]
The Michigan Task Force on Jail and Pretrial Incarceration will meet again later this month, and the members need to hear from more people who have been directly impacted by the justice system at the county level. People who have been incarcerated in county jails, or who have loved ones who have been in jails, [...]
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 [...]
Much of the national criminal justice reform conversation focuses on mandatory minimum sentences because they often result in harsh outcomes for people and our criminal justice system. Mandatory minimums require judges to impose a specific minimum prison sentence whenever someone is convicted of a given crime. This removes the judge’s ability to tailor the sentence [...]