Safe & Just Michigan

From the December 2024 | January 2025 Criminal Defense Newsletter
Legislative wrap-up and preview from our Executive Director

The final day of the 2023-24 legislative session was Thursday, December. 19. That day marked the end of a chaotic three-week Lame Duck session where Democratic leadership finally allowed major criminal justice priorities to move through committee. Unfortunately, most such bills ultimately fell short on the House Floor with Democrats unable to unify behind them. 

It was clear going into Lame Duck that House Republican leadership would not allow its caucus members to support Democratic priorities. That left Democrats to try to pass bills on a party-line vote with the narrowest possible majority — 56 to 54. This meant that a single dissenting member could block any bill, and that is what happened. Both Second Look and the bills to abolish juvenile life without parole died on the House Floor for lack of support.  

The main culprit for the failure of both packages appears to have been Rep. Nate Shannon (D-Sterling Heights), who was an early no on ending juvenile life without parole as well as on Second Look. We are told that there were other holdouts on Second Look as well. Leadership did not even schedule bail reform for a Floor vote.  

There were some positive developments during lame duck. For example, the Legislature passed bills to create a sentencing commission that would provide oversight and guidance to the legislation on sentencing issues. 

However, for us, the story of this session is House Democratic leadership’s view of criminal justice reform as a political liability. This was behind their refusal to allow members to work on most criminal justice issues prior to the lame duck period, and it was ultimately behind their failure to pass any of the important, popular, commonsense criminal justice reforms proposed during their first “trifecta” period of full control of state government in nearly 40 years.  

Having lost control of the state House in the November election, the inactivity of the past two years appears to have been a real missed opportunity. The lesson for leadership is that when you have power, use it courageously to make a difference, because you may not have it for long. 

Looking ahead to the 2025-26 session, incoming House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) has been a vocal opponent of criminal justice reform. He is not expected to move most criminal justice reform legislation. The missed opportunities of this session will continue to haunt the next.

Justice reform’s legislative wins in Michigan in 2024

When Democrats gained control of the Michigan House, Senate and Governor’s office in the 2022 elections, many people thought criminal justice reform advocates stood in a stronger position. Democratic politicians have been more likely than their Republican counterparts to voice support for our priorities in recent years.

However, that’s not how it played out. We did find many supporters in people like House Criminal Justice Committee Chair Kara Hope (D-Holt), Rep. Amos O’Neal (D-Saginaw) and Sen. Stephanie Chang (D-Detroit), and supporters across the aisle, too, in people like Sen. Ed McBroom (R-Waucedah). But leadership in both the Senate and House as well as the Governor’s office were hesitant to let items they considered controversial move forward. 

At the same time, some Republicans didn’t hesitate to turn the fear of crime into a political weapon. For instance, after a committee hearing on our bills to end juvenile life without parole, some House Republicans gathered reporters together to suggest the lawmakers who favored our legislation were soft on school shooters. 

Against this often frustrating backdrop, we still managed to take wins where we could find them in 2024, both inside the Capitol and around the state. They include:

Improving Medically Frail Parole: Michigan passed Medically Frail Parole in 2019, but up to this year, just one person had secured release under its provisions. Previously, the Parole Board had too few options placing a prospective parolee under this provision. The new law fixed Medically Frail Parole by empowering the Parole Board to parole someone to a nursing home, hospice care facility, or family home. 

Sentencing commission: The Legislature completed its work on bills to create a sentencing commission and they now await the Governor’s signature. This new law will establish a sentencing commission tasked with eliminating sentencing discrepancies across Michigan. It will build on the work of the former Criminal Justice Policy Commission, which was disbanded in 2019. We hope it will also lean on our 2021 publication; Do Michigan’s Sentencing Guidelines Meet the Legislature’s Goals? A Historical and Empirical Analysis of Prison Terms for Life-Maximum Offenses. In the coming year, the Legislature will need to turn its attention toward implementing the creation of and funding this commission. Safe & Just Michigan intends to be active in this process as well.

Budget concessions: Effective advocates have to be flexible, and that means taking solutions where you find them. One of our goals is reducing the fees paid by families of incarcerated people, such as fees to deposit money into their commissary accounts. Usually, we reach our legislative goals through bills dedicated to solving one problem, like the ones that fixed Medically Frail Parole. But this year, we saw an opportunity to address these fees in the budget process. Working with Rep. Amos O’Neal, language was added into the budget bill directing the Michigan Department of Corrections to reduce the fees paid by justice-impacted families.

Life beyond life goes on the road: For the past two years, we have been sharing the remarkable stories of some of Michigan’s former juvenile lifers. These storytellers — who are now social workers, entrepreneurs, ministers, advocates and more — have one thing in common: they were all sent to prison to die while they were still children. This year, we took their show on the road, with events in Grand Rapids and Detroit. The events were enthusiastically received, and we’re looking for more avenues to get their stories out to the public.

Thousands of lives reached: 2024 marked the third year of Clean Slate and the first full year of Automatic Expungement in Michigan. More than 5 million convictions have now been expunged, and Safe & Just Michigan is grateful to be an active part of that. We weren’t content to just help pass these bills into law; we’re continuing to help people get their records expunged.  

A look back at a strange Lame Duck

Lame Duck began with a lot of ambition and not a lot of time. After putting off work for most of the past two years, we had hoped that the three-week Lame Duck session presented an opportunity for us to make up for lost time.

Some lawmakers had different ideas

On Friday, Dec. 13, incoming House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) announced his caucus was going home because its priority bills weren’t advancing the way it had hoped. That meant House Democrats, who hold just a one-seat majority, needed every one of their members to vote in favor of a bill on order for it to pass. It also meant that any one legislator could bring things to a halt by sitting out as well. That’s what happened when state Rep. Karen Whitsett (D-Southfield) announced she wouldn’t be coming to Lansing either, making any Floor votes impossible. When all was said and done, here are our legislative priorities that didn’t make it across the finish line this session.

Bail reform: The House Criminal Justice Committee held a hearing on these bills on Nov. 12. We entered Lame Duck with measured hope for the bail reform package — we were encouraged by the hearing, but we knew it was an ambitious goal and that time was limited. Ultimately, it never progressed beyond that hearing. We have been working on this goal with partners like The Bail Project and ACLU of Michigan for several years and will continue.

Clean Slate clean-up: These bills would remove language in the Clean Slate expungement laws that holds up expungements when there has been an additional conviction between the record being expunged and the current date (an “intervening conviction.”) These bills cleared the House but didn’t make it through the Senate’s legislative process. We will continue our work to streamline the Clean Slate laws next session. 

Ending juvenile life without parole: After working so hard to end juvenile life without parole in Michigan with so many people who were directly affected by this harsh sentence, it was particularly disappointing to see these bills fail to cross the finish line. Identical sets of bills were introduced to both chambers in hopes that would speed up their legislative work, but it didn’t help. In the end, the House bills were voted out of committee and to the Floor but didn’t come up for a final vote. In the Senate, they didn’t even get a committee hearing. We will continue this important work.

Police accountability: Ambitious bills were introduced in both the House and Senate intended to bring greater accountability to law enforcement in Michigan and address some of the concerns citizens have voiced about policing. By the final week of Lame Duck, just three of these bills had any chance left of passage: SB 1091, requiring use of force policies; SB 1092, setting training requirements; and SB 1094, limiting the use of no-knock warrants. We will work on this again next session.

Productivity credits: These bills would create a system that allows incarcerated people to participate in educational, job training and other prison programing in exchange for reducing their sentences. The Senate sent their bills to the House, but the House bills didn’t even get a hearing. We have supported this plan in the past several sessions and will continue to support plans that address the challenge of life and long sentences in Michigan.

Second Look: Second Look would give people incarcerated 20 years the opportunity to have their sentence reviewed by a judge. The set of House bills was voted out of committee to the Floor but didn’t make it to a final vote. The Senate bills never got a committee hearing. Second Look policies exist in several other states and we will work to bring one here.

Vital documents: This ensures people leave prison with personally identifying documents like a Social Security card in-hand. These documents are needed for the basic tasks of reestablishing a life, such as opening a bank account, securing a place to live or getting a job. While the legislation to provide these documents to people upon their release from prison completed the legislative process, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer chose to veto these bills, saying that they conflicted with an existing policy that supports voter registration. In a letter explaining the veto, she wrote that her veto was,” a necessary consequence of the Legislature’s failure to reconcile the text of these bills with existing law,” and said she hoped to work with the Legislature to pass this “important criminal justice reform issue.”

Help amplify Inside Voices

Inside Voices is a written by justice-involved people currently incarcerated in Michigan prisons that is published in our hardcopy newsletter. While space in the printed newsletter is limited, we are able to post most of them online for everyone to read. We’ve recently published letters from writers on several topics, including life and long sentences, mental health services in prison, vendor monopolies and the problem of false hope in the criminal justice reform movement. Read the August and September letters online. 

If you would like to encourage someone who is incarcerated to submit a letter, please tell them they can send a letter of 300 words or less on criminal justice reform, pending legislation, re-entry or related topics to: Inside Voices, c/o Safe & Just Michigan, 119 Pere Marquette Drive, Suite 2A, Lansing, MI 48912. To learn more, visit us at: www.safeandjustmi.org. If you would like to join our efforts, email us at info@safeandjustmi.org or sign up for our newsletter at bit.ly/sjmsignup.