MI-CEMI

MI-CEMI Vision

Everyone wants safe communities, a fair legal system, and a wise use
of taxpayer dollars. Sadly, Michigan’s system of mass incarceration fails residents on all three levels. The current punitive approach has failed to improve public safety while exacerbating racial disparities, wasting taxpayer dollars, and harming families.

Thankfully, advocates, religious communities, human service providers, and policy makers from both parties promote smart policy changes.

They are working across the criminal legal system:

• Promoting prevention and police accountability.
• Advancing court accountability and sentencing reform.
• Improving prison conditions so they are more rehabilitative and less traumatic.
• Improving reentry services so people return to their community set up to succeed and contribute.

Unfortunately, too often these efforts have been siloed, refused to share information, or succumbed to infighting, and therefore not able to make the impact that they could.

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That’s where the Michigan Collaborative to End Mass Incarceration (MI-CEMI) comes in. We foster cooperation so organizations can accomplish more together than we can alone to end mass incarceration. We support the collaborative change through:

• Amplify and mobilize: Help members achieve strength through numbers by supporting each other’s efforts.
• Coordinating convening shared strategies: to address these topics.
• Relationship building: among members that supports full inclusion.
• Project support: to help good Steering Team-approved ideas get off the ground.
• Sharing Resources: Building shared resources such as a legislation and media tracker and supporting resource sharing so that organizations can share information such as polling data or legislative analysis.
• Conflict Management: so that differences in tactics do not undermine shared goals.

MI-CEMI is a broad-based, statewide, non-partisan collaboration representing non-profit, faith-based, advocacy, grassroots, and service organizations united to end mass incarceration in Michigan. The Collaborative seeks to create and restore healthy communities.

MI-CEMI has adopted the following goals and objectives to be effective by the year 2035:

Front End Off Ramps: 50% reduction in admissions to prison and jail through the increased use of diversionary programs that meet the goals of sentencing.

Programming: 75% of the population in each prison facility shall be engaged in productive activities at least 30 hours per week.

Sentencing: 50% reduction in the average length of stay of persons admitted to prison through the implementation of sentencing and parole reforms.

Reentry: 50% reduction in the return-to-prison rate for persons released from State prison, through a rededication to the Michigan Prisoner Reentry Initiative Model, which includes full community engagement and community funding control, codified in law.