Safe & Just Michigan's report, “Clean Slate Year 3: The First Year of Automatic Expungements — Looking Back and Looking Ahead,” outlines both the successes and challenges encountered since Clean Slate became a reality in Michigan. Clean Slate widened the petition process for expungement on April 11, 2021, by making more convictions eligible for expungement [...]
Safe & Just Michigan's report, "Changing the Narrative on Criminal Justice: Michiganders Ready for Reform," explores public perceptions of the criminal justice system in Michigan and support for various proposed reforms. Between Feb. 25, 2020, and March 5, 2020, Emma White Research, contracted by Safe & Just Michigan, contacted 1,002 registered voters in Michigan, including [...]
Do Michigan’s Sentencing Guidelines Meet the Legislature’s Goals? A Historical and Empirical Analysis of Prison Terms for Life-Maximum Offenses by Barbara Levine, J.D., Anne Mahar, Ph.D., and Justin Smith, Ph.D. Among the key goals of Michigan’s sentencing guidelines are ensuring that: 1) sentences are proportional to the offense and the offender and 2) similar [...]
Safe & Just Michigan's report, “The Problems of Mandatory Sentencing: The troubling legacy of Michigan’s felony firearm law,” supports the passage of House Bills 5993-5994, which would end the mandatory two-year sentence for a first offense felony firearm conviction, and urges further action to roll back mandatory sentencing. Key findings from the report include: Black [...]
Barbara Levine, the founder of CAPPS, is a featured author in the Michigan Bar Journal September 2017 issue. Levine’s article, Too many prisoners: Undoing the legacy of getting too tough, outlines policies the legislature could adopt to safely reduce Michigan’s prison population. A more detailed examination can be found in CAPPS 2015 report, 10,000 Michigan prisoners: Strategies to [...]
In June 2017, the Californians for Safety and Justice (CSJ) released a publication titled, Blueprint for Shared Safety. The Blueprint is based on a year of research and evaluation of its own and others’ successes in putting crime survivors and public safety at the center of their work. The Alliance for Safety and Justice (ASJ), CAPPS's partner, is [...]
On July 13, 2017, Urban Institute released a new study called, A Matter of Time: The Causes and Consequences of Rising Time Served in America’s Prisons. The project, funded by Open Society Foundations, provides state-by-state analysis of prison population demographics and length of time served. This new resource features audio recordings that highlight expertise and personal insights from [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
New CAPPS report lays out roadmap to safely reduce Michigan’s prison population On June 11, CAPPS announced the release of a new report titled: 10,000 fewer Michigan prisoners: Strategies to reach the goal. This report examines the key factors that led to a striking increase in Michigan’s prison population over the last three decades, and recommends a [...]