LANSING –The Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center today joined Michigan's leaders to release the results of an unprecedented review of crime and corrections data to determine how the state might reduce corrections spending while reinvesting in measures that will make communities safer and stronger.
At a policy forum held today in the State Capitol, the CSG Justice Center presented its findings after a rigorous, one-year analysis of the state's prison and parole population, reincarceration and rearrest rates, and other crime data.
Governor Jennifer M. Granholm, Senate Majority Leader Michael D. Bishop, and Speaker of the House Andy Dillon requested the CSG Justice Center conduct the study, and appointed a bipartisan, inter-branch working group to guide the technical assistance project.
"Given our current fiscal crisis, we can't have business as usual," said Robert Emerson, state budget director, a member of the working group. "We welcome this range of options as a first step in generating some savings and ensuring that we get the best return on our investments."
Findings from the CSG Justice Center's report include the following:
- The likelihood of arrest for violent offenders appears to have declined from 2000 to 2007.
- Fifty percent of people on probation supervision and 50-70 percent of people on parole are unemployed.
- People released from prison in 2007 had served, on average, 127 percent of their court-imposed minimum sentence before being placed on community supervision.
Drawing on these and other findings, the CSG Justice Center delivered a package of policy options for the state's consideration, which include ensuring that most offenders (except for those with statutory maximum life sentences) do not serve more than 120 percent of their court-imposed sentence.
The Justice Center estimated that enacting this and other options could generate $262 million in savings from FY2011-2015. Successful implementation of the policy options described in the report depends on substantial upfront and sustained reinvestment of a portion of the projected savings.
Options that the CSG Justice Center presented for reducing crime included the following:
- providing support to local law enforcement to deploy targeted crime fighting strategies;
- reducing the state's crime lab backlogs to reduce the delays in processing evidence;
- responding to probation violations with swift, certain and proportional sanctions;
- expanding employment services for high-risk probationers and parolees.
"Michigan has the highest violent crime rate in the region," said Senator Alan Cropsey (R-Dewitt), a member of the working group. "Increasing public safety must be our number one goal, and we are pleased that the Justice Center presented us with a balanced package that reinvests savings from corrections in strategies to reduce crime and victimization."
"The CSG Justice Center offered us a nonpartisan, data-driven approach to addressing crime and recidivism," said Representative Alma Wheeler-Smith (D-Ypsilanti), who also serves on the working group. "We will give full consideration to these options and look forward to additional input from a diverse group of stakeholders."
"I see the CSG Justice Center process as a critical step in our journey toward an affordable and effective corrections system that helps us go beyond what we have achieved in cost savings since 2003," said Corrections Director Patricia Caruso, another member of the working group.
The CSG Justice Center's assistance to Michigan is part of the Justice Center's Justice Reinvestment Initiative, which has provided similar data-driven analyses and policy options to help bipartisan groups of policymakers interested in increasing public safety and reducing spending on corrections in eight other states, including Texas, Kansas, and Arizona. Assistance from the Justice Center is made possible through funding support provided by the Bureau of Justice Assistance of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Public Safety Performance Project of The Pew Charitable Trusts' Center on the States, and the state of Michigan.
The Council of State Governments Justice Center is a national nonprofit organization that serves policymakers at the local, state, and federal levels from all branches of government. It provides practical, nonpartisan advice and consensus-driven strategies—informed by available evidence—to increase public safety and strengthen communities.