2025-2026 Criminal Justice Reform Agenda

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Robyn Reiter

The Michigan Collaborative to End Mass Incarceration (MI-CEMI), which serves over 115 member organizations working to improve public safety and end mass incarceration, established the following policy priorities for 2025–2026. These priorities were shaped through deep collaboration among justice-impacted leaders and organizations across the state, reflecting a range of political perspectives, lived experiences, and roles in the criminal legal sector. Michigan’s criminal legal system demands sweeping change. But experience has shown that without clear focus, urgent efforts can lose power. By aligning around these shared priorities, our movement aims to concentrate its energy where we can make the greatest impact and build momentum for broader transformation.

Prevent Incarceration and Improving Public Safety

  1. Provide Youth Defense [PRIORITY]: Expand Michigan Indigent Defense Commission to include defense services for youth in the juvenile justice system.
  2. Establish Police Improvement Policies [PRIORITY]: Establish statewide policies to improve police practices such as strengthening training requirements, specifying required use of force elements, limiting the use of no-knock warrants, and tracking separation records.
  3. Reduce Pretrial Detention: Implement a court date notification program through SCAO to improve attendance at court dates, reduce use of bench warrants, reduce pretrial detention. Work with local units of government to pilot additional policies to reduce use of wealth-based detention. 
  4. Protect Restorative Justice: Establish state policies to increase statewide access to restorative justice processes in court and community-based settings by protecting the privacy of the content of restorative justice proceedings.
  5. Fair Youth Interrogation: Prohibit the use of deceptive interrogation practices against minors.  

Reduce Excessive Prison Length of Stay

  1. Judicial Sentencing Review [PRIORITY]: Permit local judges to review the sentences of qualified people who have already been imprisoned for decades.
  2. Habitual Charging Statute changes:  Adjust Michigan’s Habitual Charging rules to prevent the enhancement from being used when multiple charges arise from a single event and to establish a limit to the lookback period for the enhancement.
  3. Oppose Drug Mandatory Minimums: Resist efforts to create draconian mandatory minimums for drug crimes.
  4. Aaron Retroactivity: Allow the People v Aaron state supreme court ruling on felony murder to apply retroactively to cases prior to the 1980 ruling.  
  5. Sentencing Commission implementation: Fund and establish the Sentencing Commission passed last term.

Programming, Conditions, and Oversight

  1. Protect Prison Visitation & Communication [PRIORITY]: Promote family and community connection by protecting and expanding access to prison visits and communication. This includes ending the practice of revoking visitation rights for non-visit related infractions, reducing barriers to visitation, and expanding communication access to incarcerated people. 
  2. Strengthen Corrections Ombudsman: Strengthen the legislative corrections ombudsman office’s power to receive, investigate, and report on complaints. 
  3. Eliminate Prison Medical Copays:  Eliminate mandatory copays for prison healthcare. 
  4. Stop excessive and abusive strip searches: End MDOC practices of routine strip searching incarcerated people after visits with attorneys, the corrections ombudsman, participation in work details.
  5. End Use of Solitary: End solitary confinement in ALL Michigan prisons, jails, and juvenile detention facilities, bringing our state into full compliance with the UN’s Mandela Rules.
  6. Establish Certified Peer GED Tutoring: Develop a program to train and certify peer GED tutors to expand and improve GED instruction in MIchigan’s Prisons. 

Improve Prison Reentry

  1. Provide Reentry Services for People Discharged/Exonerated [PRIORITY]: Ensure that people who leave prison and who are not on parole have access to state reentry services. 
  2. Fair Chance Housing [PRIORITY]: Reduce housing discrimination based on criminal conviction by requiring individual review of background checks rather than blanket exclusions and offering tax incentives for non-discriminatory housing. 
  3. Clean slate implementation: Add nonconviction records to automatic expungement.
  4. Eliminate conviction-based barriers to healthcare employment: Remove legislative and administrative rule prohibitions on healthcare employment for people with criminal records from working in healthcare jobs.
  5. State IDs at parole/discharge: Codify current practices for provision of state ID and birth certificate to people at time of release from prison.