How to cut corrections, by Jack Lessenberry, Michigan Radio on May 19, 2017 Six years ago, the superintendent of a small and struggling school district in Gratiot County wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to Governor Rick Snyder asking that his school be declared a prison. “The State of Michigan spends annually somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 [...]
How Personal Data and Algorithms Send People to Prison How much control do we give data and algorithms over our lives? Should they be able to determine how long an inmate stays behind bars? These questions are at the heart of a recent New York Times article on a state supreme court case in Wisconsin, wherein [...]
Convicts leaving incarceration often have a difficult time re-entering the working world because, according to one survey, 65 percent of employers would never consider hiring someone with a felony record. And there are other barriers to employment. For instance, John SCHWARTZ of Trinity Health-Michigan told the story of one hospital employee who was arrested for a drunk driving [...]
Business leaders from around the state seeking to hire those being released from prison or jail praised the Vocational Village program in Ionia in a House committee this week and asked for more changes in the state's criminal justice policies to remove barriers to hiring former prisoners. The House Law and Justice Committee has been [...]
On April 11, 2017 CAPPS Executive Director Laura Sager joined a wide range of national experts in New York for a series of panel discussions on Accounting for Violence: How to Increase Safety and Reduce Our Failed Reliance on Mass Incarceration. The event was convened by Common Justice, a program of the Vera Institute. It [...]
The Brennan Center has released a three-year research project that compared federal and state criminal laws with convictions and sentences of the nation's prisoners, and determined that 39 percent of them are behind bars for "no compelling public safety reason." Read more about the study's findings at the ABA Journal here, or take a look at the [...]
The Alliance for Safety and Justice (ASJ) is national partner for CAPPS in the fight for new safety priorities. Since 1985, state spending on prisons has grown seven times faster than spending on higher education. ASJ premiered “What You Invest in Grows,” to highlight our misplaced spending priorities and re imagine how we could invest the [...]
CAPPS works closely with the Alliance for Safety and Justice (ASJ) a newly-formed national organization. ASJ is providing CAPPS with resources it needs to carry out a comprehensive reform campaign. In addition, CAPPS and ASJ are working together on public education and outreach to better address the needs of crime survivors, especially those in communities hardest hit by crime [...]
Click here to read the original article: detroitnews.com | Download a PDF here: Smarter-parole-for-a-safer-Michigan By Rep. Dave Pagel Detroit News, Aug. 11, 2016 Rep. Dave Pagel, R-Oronoko Township, serves the 78th District in the Michigan House of Representatives. Over the last year, bipartisan efforts to reform Michigan’s corrections system have intensified. Reducing Michigan’s corrections spending is critically [...]
CAPPS works closely with the California-based Alliance for Safety and Justice (ASJ), which is organizing crime survivors in support of new safety priorities. ASJ is a national organization that partners with state-based organizations like CAPPS to help advance state reform. ASJ conducted an in depth survey on the views of crime survivors called Crime Survivors Speak. It is the [...]