A coalition of organizations released their FY2027 Michigan Budget Recommendations to invest in crime prevention, rehabilitation, and reentry.
Take Action:
- Endorse the letter on behalf of your organization
- Tell your lawmakers to support these budget recommendations.
With economic uncertainty and rising costs impacting families across Michigan, this year’s budget is an opportunity to invest in proven strategies that improve public safety, reduce long-term costs, and strengthen communities.
As lawmakers finalize the FY2027 budget, we call on them to:
- Invest in violence prevention by renewing funding for the Michigan Diversion Council, sustaining community violence intervention programs, and supporting the bipartisan Sentencing Commission to ensure smart, data-driven policy.
- Invest in rehabilitation by eliminating counterproductive medical copays, maintaining access to healthcare, and expanding educational opportunities in prisons.
- Invest in reentry by restoring funding for community-based reentry programs, strengthening support systems, and ensuring services are available to people returning home, including those not on parole.
These investments improve public safety, reduce long-term prison costs, and strengthen economic stability for communities across Michigan.
Budget process updates (as of 4/28/2026)
Get the details
At MI-CEMI, we provide you with vital information about key policy issues like the budget, but that’s not enough for us. We also want you to have the capacity to do your own analysis. So here are four resources to help you look more closely at the state budget
- House Budget Office corrections budget page
- Senate Fiscal Office Corrections budget page
- Executive Recommendations
- Budget comparison sheet tracking recent year’s budget against this year’s proposals (note: we are still pulling all relevant information into this document. Big thanks to Safe & Just Michigan for their assistance)
The bad news:
Compared to FY2026, the proposed House budget includes the following cuts to the corrections budget:
- $14,198,100 from Community Corrections, which helps local jurisdictions to create alternatives to prison and jail for “non-violent, moderate-to-high-risk offenders”.
- $850,000 for higher education in prison (also eliminated in Senate and Governor budgets)
- $940,300 from education/skilled trades/career readiness programs
- $574,500 from parole board operations
- $66,800 from inmate legal services
- $1,417,900 from hepatitis C treatment
The House also proposed significant reductions to the Judiciary budget, including:
- $6,946,400 for the judicial information systems and
- $7,569,300 for Supreme Court Administration
- Additionally they limit expansion of drug, mental health, and veterans problem-solving courts and the community dispute resolution program, foster care review board, and jail reform advisory support.
The House Budget also cuts:
- $24M from MIDC grants to communities
The Good News
- The Executive, Senate, and House budgets all recommend maintaining offender success reentry at 2026 levels.
- The House budget has some improved transparency language, “(1) The department shall maintain, on a publicly accessible website, a department scorecard that identifies, tracks, and updates on a quarterly basis key metrics that are used to monitor and improve the department’s performance.
(2) The department shall notify the standard report recipients when the quarterly updates to the department scorecard are available on a publicly accessible website.” - None of the budgets include cuts to prison food service, clinical complexes, mental health and substance use disorder treatment services, or prisoner health care services (except for the proposed Hep C cuts). Last year food and healthcare were on the proposed chopping block, and we effectively pushed back to block those cuts.
That’s not much for good news, but we’ll take what we can get.
Of note
- The House budget also includes a mandate for corrections officers to be moved to 12 hour shifts.
- The reporting requirements for academic and vocation programs in both the House and Executive budgets remove the requirement to report on how many people do not complete the programs.