Whitewashed

There are at least two kinds of prison neglect in America. The first is visible: leaking ceilings, blackened grout, rusted pipes, brown water, air vents caked with dust and fungus, showers that smell rotten, cells that never fully dry out. The second is administrative: the memo that says conditions are “within expected parameters,” the grievance rejected as untimely, the inspection narrowed to avoid the worst areas, the spokesperson who insists that what people can see with their own eyes is not really there. That second form of neglect: the bureaucratic whitewashing of danger, is what makes the first so durable. And nowhere is that pattern more vividly exposed than in Michigan, where incarcerated women at the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility have spent years describing black mold, failing ventilation, medical neglect, and retaliation, while jail and prison officials elsewhere in the state have faced scrutiny over unsafe drinking water and environmental contamination.^[1][2][3]

This is not merely a story about old buildings. It is a story about power. Incarcerated people cannot move away from contamination, open a different tap, hire their own environmental assessor, or take their children elsewhere for the night. They are captive to the state not only in the legal sense, but in the most literal physical sense: captive to its walls, air, plumbing, and maintenance decisions. When correctional systems minimize mold, suppress water concerns, or bury evidence of environmental exposure behind procedure, they are not just failing to maintain buildings. They are converting confinement itself into a public-health hazard.^[4][5]

The national template: Deny, Delay, Deflect

Across the United States, reports of toxic mold, contaminated water, sewage leaks, vermin, failing ventilation, and dangerous heat are often framed by correctional agencies as isolated maintenance issues rather than structural failures. Yet the pattern is remarkably consistent. The Marshall Project, Prison Legal News, and the Equal Justice Initiative have all documented how understaffing, deferred maintenance, overcrowding, and weak oversight create conditions where environmental hazards are not accidental side effects but recurring features of incarceration.^[6][7][8]

When those conditions are challenged, institutions tend to respond with a familiar playbook. First comes denial: officials characterize mold as dirt, mildew, staining, or mere discoloration; they describe foul water as temporary discoloration after plumbing work; they insist that air-quality complaints are exaggerated. Then comes procedural deflection: incarcerated people are told to file grievances, only to have those grievances rejected, delayed, lost, or declared defective. Finally comes reputational management: public statements are carefully worded to acknowledge “concerns” while denying systemic danger. The result is that prison officials minimize the severity of the situation and a bureaucratic coat of paint is applied over rot.^[2][6][7]

The legal structure of incarceration helps sustain this dynamic. The Prison Litigation Reform Act requires incarcerated people to exhaust internal grievance procedures before bringing many federal claims, which means prison administrators often control the gateway to outside review. Courts can and do intervene, but only after years of filings, dismissal motions, evidentiary disputes, and appeals. In the meantime, people keep breathing the air, drinking the water, and sleeping under the leaks.^[3][9]

Michigan’s mold crisis: the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility

MDOC Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility

If the national story provides the template, Michigan supplies one of its starkest case studies. The Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti is the state’s only women’s prison and has become a symbol of how environmental danger can be normalized inside a correctional institution, even while evidence accumulates in plain sight. For years, incarcerated women, family members, whistleblowers, advocates, and journalists have described a facility with leaking roof, excessive moisture, failing ventilation, and widespread black mold in showers, vents, ceilings, and other living areas. Those reports eventually coalesced into the long-running federal litigation known as Bailey v. Washington, which alleges that prison officials knew of dangerous conditions and failed to remedy them.^[1][3][10]

The allegations are not vague. Court filings and reporting describe mold falling from air vents, spreading across shower seams, eating through painted surfaces, and flourishing in an environment of chronic dampness. In 2025, federal rulings allowed substantial portions of the case to move forward, rejecting key defenses by the Michigan Department of Corrections and concluding that plaintiffs had plausibly alleged unconstitutional conditions and deliberate indifference. In another significant ruling, the court faulted the grievance process itself, finding that the system had serious flaws and that plaintiffs had not simply failed to complain, they had been functionally blocked from meaningful relief.^[9][10][11]

What makes Huron Valley especially revealing is the gap between internal reality and public posture. Reporting in 2025 and 2026 described lawmakers visiting the prison and being shown areas where obvious mold or black staining was brushed off as harmless residue, paint, or ordinary wear. At the same time, internal assessments and litigation records pointed to persistent infrastructure failures and ventilation problems. This is what “whitewashed” means in practice: not just literal paint over damage, but the official reclassification of danger as something benign, expected, or not worth urgent action.^[2][11][12]

The human cost has been devastating. One of the best-known women associated with the case, Krystal Clark, has publicly described years of respiratory distress, swelling, and worsening illness that she and her advocates link to mold exposure inside the prison. In 2025 and 2026, local and statewide reporting amplified concerns that mold and inadequate medical care were part of a broader crisis at Huron Valley, especially after multiple deaths at the facility heightened public scrutiny. No responsible account should collapse all illness at the prison into a single environmental cause; prisons are complex places, and causation can be medically and legally contested. But it is equally irresponsible to ignore the pattern: repeated reports of mold, repeated denials, repeated claims that women were not being heard until judges and public pressure forced the issue into the open.^{[1][10][12][13]}

How the coverup works

The concealment of environmental hazards in prisons rarely looks like a single dramatic conspiracy. More often, it operates through ordinary administrative habits. A warden reframes mold as cosmetic discoloration. A facility applies patchwork maintenance rather than replacing the failing system producing the moisture. A grievance is rejected on a technicality. A spokesperson emphasizes that findings are typical for a “large institutional setting.” A court deadline stretches months into years. Each act may appear minor in isolation; together, they create a machine for institutional disbelief.^[2][9][11]

In Michigan, that machine has been visible in both the mold litigation and public oversight hearings. Critics have described a double standard in which officials reassure the public while staff and insiders privately acknowledge serious problems. The essence of whitewashing is not that nothing is known; it is that too much is known, and the system’s first reflex is to manage perception rather than eliminate the hazard.^[11][12]

Contaminated drinking water: Michigan’s other prison health scandal

Central Michigan Correctional Facility- Level I

Black mold is only one half of Michigan’s prison environmental story. The other is water: unsafe, discolored, chemically tainted, or otherwise distrusted water in jails and prisons where those confined have no meaningful ability to refuse it. Michigan has seen multiple flashpoints. Some are historic, like the water contamination associated with correctional facilities in St. Louis near the Velsicol Chemical Superfund site. Others are immediate, like the 2026 revelations about copper and lead concerns at the Kalamazoo County Jail. Taken together, they show that the same logic of minimization extends from air and buildings to the most basic necessity of all.^[4][14][15]

An aerial photo of the former Velsicol Chemical Co. factory along the Pine River in St. Louis, Mich. The company made chemicals like DDT and PBB. The property is now a Superfund site.

The St. Louis prison water story is especially haunting because it ties correctional exposure to one of Michigan’s most notorious industrial contamination legacies. Scholars and advocates have pointed to the Central Michigan and St. Louis correctional facilities’ proximity to the former Velsicol site and to contamination involving p-CBSA, a byproduct associated with DDT manufacturing. Reports and litigation have alleged that incarcerated people were forced to drink and bathe in contaminated water for years while staff members avoided it by relying on bottled water or other alternatives. Whether every claim has been adjudicated in the way plaintiffs hoped is beside the point for this broader pattern: once again, captive people described environmental danger while institutions insisted that the situation remained acceptable.^[4][14]

The situation in St. Louis hits close to home for me. I was there in 2013 when the water was brown and had a strong solvent smell. I would boil water that came from the tap to try and make it drinkable. Brand new white t shirts turned brown in the wash. We had to bathe in it, brush our teeth with it, and our food was prepared with it. It was the only prison in the state where you could buy bottled water in the commissary. Originally water had been donated to the prison for the prisoner’s consumption, but the MDOC decided to profit from it. Prison staff didn’t drink the tap water they were given bottled drinking water by the administration. When the city of St. Louis was connected to another water system and no longer used the ground water, the water in the prison got better. If I come down with cancer I will be filling a lawsuit too.

The same structure appears in local jails. In Kalamazoo County in 2026, officials acknowledged that bottled water was necessary after testing revealed elevated copper levels and some lead exceedances in parts of the jail’s water system following plumbing failures. Yet the administration’s public statements remained hedged and shifting saying bottled water was supplied “out of an abundance of caution,” the jail remained safe to occupy, cooking and showering could continue, further testing was underway, and filtration measures would be installed. Those statements may all be true within the narrow language of public health guidance. But from the perspective of incarcerated people who reported brown water, nausea, headaches, or fear about what they were consuming, the effect was familiar: partial acknowledgment without full transparency, and reassurance before clarity.^[15][16][17]

Flint, Genesee County Jail, and the carceral version of environmental abandonment

Michigan also offers a brutal example of what water neglect looks like when a community-wide catastrophe enters a jail. During the Flint water crisis, lawsuits by former Genesee County Jail detainees alleged that incarcerated people were forced to continue drinking contaminated tap water even after the dangers of Flint’s water system were becoming widely known. According to reporting on the litigation, bottled water brought by families or donors was sometimes rejected or restricted, while detainees—who could not leave, install filters, or seek a safer source—were left to bear the exposure. If Flint demonstrated how governments can fail whole cities, the jail lawsuits demonstrated how incarceration intensifies that failure: it traps people at the point of exposure and removes the ordinary survival options everyone else still has.^[18][19]

That is the through line connecting mold at Huron Valley, contaminated prison water near St. Louis, and the recent concerns in Kalamazoo. Carceral institutions do not merely contain the consequences of broader environmental neglect; they concentrate them. The people inside are politically weak, geographically fixed, and administratively silenced. They can be made to live with exposures that no school, hospital, office building, or suburban neighborhood would tolerate for long. And because the suffering occurs behind secure perimeters, the public often encounters it only after a lawsuit, a whistleblower, a death, or a spectacular equipment failure.^[4][6][15]

What accountability would actually require

The single argument that I am trying to make is that environmental hazards in prisons and jails are not side issues. They are core civil-rights issues. Mold is not simply a maintenance problem when people are forced to inhale it for years. Contaminated water is not simply an infrastructure problem when people cannot choose a different source. And official denial is not simply bad messaging when it delays medical care, blocks legal relief, and normalizes dangerous conditions. The law already recognizes that incarceration does not erase the state’s duty to provide humane conditions. The problem is that enforcement often arrives late, after exposure has become routine.^[3][8][9]

Real accountability would require more than promises of renovation or improved communication. It would mean independent environmental testing that is not controlled solely by corrections departments; public release of air- and water-quality data in forms families and advocates can actually use; stronger protections for incarcerated whistleblowers and staff who report unsafe conditions; medical review that treats environmental exposure as a serious risk rather than an inconvenience; and oversight bodies willing to regard chronic mold, contaminated water, and failing ventilation as constitutional emergencies rather than public-relations nuisances. It would also require a cultural shift: away from the reflexive assumption that incarcerated people exaggerate, and toward the recognition that they are often the earliest and most accurate witnesses to the conditions around them.^[6][8][15]

For Michigan, the lesson is already written. Women at Huron Valley said the mold was real. Prisoners in St. Louis said the water was dangerous. People in Kalamazoo reported brown water and fear long before the issue settled into official language about mitigation and sampling. Former detainees in Flint said captivity turned a public utility disaster into something even more coercive. Again and again, the state’s first instinct was not to remove the hazard but to manage the story. That is the real whitewash: the attempt to paint over evidence until the public looks away. The burden of proof then falls on the people with the least power to carry it.^{[1][4][15][18]}

But the record is no longer hidden. It is in court rulings, local journalism, advocacy reporting, medical complaints, and the testimonies of the people who lived through it. The question now is not whether these hazards exist. The question is how long the public will accept a correctional system that responds to black mold, contaminated drinking water, and preventable exposure with the same old institutional shrug and another coat of paint.

Endnotes

Michigan Public, “Inmates at Michigan’s only women’s prison sue state over black mold exposure” (Aug. 14, 2025).
Detroit Metro Times, “New push for accountability at Michigan women’s prison” (Feb. 23, 2026).
Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, Bailey v. Michigan Department of Corrections case materials.
Environmental Justice at Western, “Prisons: Environmental Injustice, Toxic Exposure, and a Lack of Humanitarianism” (May 23, 2023).
Equal Justice Initiative, materials on prison conditions and environmental dangers in prisons.
The Marshall Project, reporting and analysis on prison mold and unsanitary jail conditions.
Prison Legal News, “It Smelled Like Death: Reports of Mold Contamination in Prisons and Jails” (Apr. 2, 2019).
Equal Justice Initiative, “Prison Conditions.”
Michigan Advance, “Federal judge dings Corrections director in new ruling as toxic mold lawsuit continues” (May 30, 2025).
Michigan Advance, “Federal judge: MDOC not entitled to qualified immunity in women’s prison toxic mold case” (July 7, 2025).
Bridge Michigan, Metro Times, and related 2026 reporting on legislative visits, internal assessments, and conditions at Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility.
WEMU, “Michigan Department of Corrections director visits Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility amidst calls for her resignation” (May 26, 2026).
Local and statewide 2025–2026 reporting on deaths, medical concerns, and mold-related allegations at Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility.
Reporting and commentary regarding contamination concerns linked to St. Louis and Central Michigan correctional facilities near the Velsicol site.

GPS Monitoring and Parole: Safety Tool or Lifetime Burden?

I have previously written about my experience wearing a GPS Tether while on parole in an article called Tether Ball and Chain that was published back in December of 2018. Since then, as part of my ministry, I have spoken with other people who have had to wear a GPS tether as a condition of parole and a surprising number of them who must wear it for life. I thought it was time to revisit the topic with up-to-date information regarding electronic monitoring as used by the State of Michigan, with context about how this practice is used in other states and by the federal government.

Electronic monitoring has expanded significantly across the country, with an estimated 564,000 Americans currently monitored on an active electronic tracking program at any given time. This footprint is heavily driven by federal surveillance programs: including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which tracks roughly 180,000 individuals through its Alternatives to Detention programs, alongside state and local criminal justice systems. The impact of this technology is particularly visible in the Midwest, which holds the nation’s highest concentration of state-level community surveillance. In Michigan alone, the Department of Corrections monitors 5,700 parolees and probationers daily, a statistic that expands even further when accounting for county-level pretrial programs and roughly 400 individuals sentenced to the state’s strict lifetime GPS monitoring laws. As there is no centralized reporting system for electronic monitoring for pretrial programs it is not possible to determine the total number of individuals on tether in Michigan. A report from 2020 specifically focused on 2018-19 FY data from the Wayne County jail listed the number of individuals on pretrial electronic monitoring on a daily basis at 416 and a total of 1991 for the year. It is therefore likely that the total number of pretrial individuals on tethers in Michigan is very high for people who are under electronic supervision having only been charged with misdemeanors or lower-level felonies and are considered legally innocent.^{[28][29][30][31][33]}

Michigan has used electronic tethering for decades, and today the Michigan Department of Corrections relies on GPS monitoring as one of several community-supervision tools for parolees and some other supervised individuals. Supporters describe GPS as a way to track movements, enforce exclusion zones, and respond quickly to violations without sending every high-risk person back to prison. Critics argue that the same technology can become a costly and punitive form of perpetual surveillance, especially when it is imposed for life. The real question is not whether GPS monitoring sounds tough, but whether it actually improves public safety enough to justify its financial cost, privacy intrusions, and long-term human consequences.

How Michigan’s GPS Tether Program Developed

Michigan’s electronic monitoring program did not begin with today’s always-on GPS anklets. Earlier community-supervision systems relied on curfew monitoring and radio-frequency technology, which could confirm whether a person was at home during required hours but could not map their movements throughout the day. Over time, the state expanded its approach. Michigan Department of Corrections policy now identifies several forms of electronic monitoring, including curfew monitoring, alcohol monitoring, and GPS monitoring.

Legislative and policy materials from the early 2010s show the Department had moved away from passive GPS and was using active GPS that continuously monitored offender movement and generated alerts for boundary violations. Those same materials described GPS as a routine supervision tool for some parolees, while a separate statutory framework created lifetime electronic monitoring for certain criminal sexual conduct convictions committed on or after August 28, 2006. ^[1][2][3][4]

How The Technology Works

In practical terms, GPS monitoring uses an ankle-worn device that communicates with satellites to estimate location and with cellular networks to send data back to a monitoring center. Michigan policy describes GPS as one approved electronic monitoring technology, and state materials about tether alerts show how the system can flag low battery conditions, loss of GPS signal, strap tampering, communication failures, and geographic rule violations. In other words, the system does not merely record where someone has been; it can also create alerts when a person enters an exclusion zone, leaves an approved area, breaks curfew, removes the strap, or fails to keep the device charged. For lifetime monitoring, Michigan law requires the program to track movement and location from release until death, both in real time and recorded time, with information retrievable by courts or law enforcement. That makes GPS tethering both a supervision tool and a long-term data-collection system. ^[1][3][5][6]

Why Place Matters in GPS Monitoring

Location accuracy problems do not look the same everywhere. In dense urban areas, tall buildings, narrow streets, parking structures, and reflective surfaces can create an “urban canyon” effect in which satellite signals are blocked or bounce before reaching the device, producing location drift or jumpy tracking. A person may appear on the wrong side of a street, just outside a building, or briefly inside an exclusion zone when the problem is really signal reflection or weak satellite visibility. Indoor settings can make this worse, especially in apartment buildings, basements, factories, hospitals, and courthouses, where both GPS reception and cellular transmission may be impaired. Rural areas present a different set of problems. They usually have better open-sky satellite visibility, but they may have weaker cellular coverage, longer dead zones between towers, and more rugged terrain, all of which can delay uploads or create communication-loss alerts even when the device is still attached and the wearer is where they are supposed to be. In short, cities tend to create accuracy problems, while rural areas more often create connectivity problems, and both can generate misleading alerts if agencies treat every signal anomaly as deliberate misconduct. ^{[15][18][19][20]}

This urban-rural divide matters in Michigan because the state spans very different supervision environments. Metro Detroit and other built-up areas can produce the urban canyon, indoor, and multi-story housing problems that make exclusion-zone alerts harder to interpret with confidence. At the same time, northern and western rural counties can present sparse carrier coverage, long travel distances, and weather-related or terrain-related communication problems that slow transmission and complicate response. A GPS system that seems highly precise in policy language may therefore behave very differently depending on where a person lives, works, receives treatment, or travels. That inconsistency is important when violations can lead to jail, prison, or new supervision sanctions. The practical lesson is that a statewide tether program should not assume that one device setting, one alert threshold, or one response protocol works equally well in downtown Detroit, a suburban warehouse corridor, and a remote rural area of the Upper or northern Lower Peninsula. ^{[15][18][19][20]}

The Claimed Benefits and the Real Drawbacks

The strongest argument for GPS monitoring is that it gives parole agents more information than ordinary supervision. It can help enforce victim-related exclusion zones, document curfew compliance, and provide a record when someone absconds or tampers with a device. Research outside Michigan suggests electronic monitoring can reduce some forms of recidivism for some groups, particularly when it is paired with structured supervision and support rather than used as a stand-alone punishment. But the drawbacks are substantial. GPS is not a form of prevention itself; it mostly detects movement and rule violations. It cannot stop a new crime in real time unless staff are actively watching, capable of responding immediately, and focused on the right alerts. It also produces false or low-value alerts caused by dead batteries, weak cellular service, signal gaps, or device malfunctions, which can burden both staff and monitored individuals. More broadly, critics argue that tethering can widen the net of punishment by turning technical missteps such as charging failures, late arrivals, or ambiguous zone entries into violations that trigger incarceration, even when there is no new victim and no new crime. It can also interfere with work, housing, medical care, family life, and mental well-being, especially when the device is visible and stigmatizing. ^{[5][7][8][9][10]}

What It Costs and Who Profits

The cost question is harder to answer with precision than the rhetoric around GPS monitoring might suggest. Michigan law is clear on one point: a person on lifetime electronic monitoring must reimburse the Department or its agent, and after discharge from parole the statute sets the rate at $60 per month. Department policy also states that offenders are required to pay electronic monitoring fees under the supervision-fee policy, and Michigan’s supervision-fee framework sets a higher monthly rate for people supervised with an electronic monitoring device than for those without one. What is less transparent in public-facing sources is the full cost structure borne by the state, including equipment procurement, monitoring-center staffing, maintenance, data services, and vendor contracts. That opacity matters, because GPS monitoring generates revenue for private equipment makers, monitoring contractors, telecommunications providers, and any state or local systems funded partly through user fees. Public Michigan materials tied tether alerts to 3M electronic monitoring equipment, showing at least one major corporate player in the technology chain. More broadly, the profit model is straightforward: the longer a person remains on a device, the longer equipment, monitoring, service, and fee streams continue. Even if GPS is cheaper than incarceration, that does not mean it is cheap, fair, or free from financial incentives that reward prolonged surveillance. ^{[1][3][5][6][11]}

While the amount spent on GPS monitoring is not readily accessible, industry sources project eyepopping revenue growth world-wide. The market value is staggering. In 2024 the market value was pegged at 2.95 Billion US Dollars globally. By 2032 the projection is a market value of 6.5 Billion USD. There is a tremendous financial incentive to grow the use of this technology even in the face or ethical, moral, social or technical critiques.^[32]

How Michigan Compares with Other State and Federal Tether Programs

Michigan sits in the more punitive wing of state tether policy because it combines ordinary discretionary electronic monitoring for some parolees with a separate mandatory lifetime electronic monitoring scheme for certain criminal sexual conduct convictions. That is not how every state operates. Across the country, electronic monitoring is a patchwork: some states use GPS mainly as a short-term supervision tool for pretrial release, probation, or parole; some authorize it broadly but leave most decisions to judges, parole boards, or supervising agencies; and some, like California and Florida, built especially aggressive sex-offender GPS systems after high-profile legislation in the mid-2000s. In that broader landscape, Michigan is not alone in imposing very long monitoring terms on some sex offenders, but it is distinct in the rigidity of its statutory lifetime model and in the way the requirement attaches automatically to certain convictions rather than turning primarily on an individualized finding of current risk. That makes Michigan less flexible than states that allow periodic review, narrower tailoring, or greater judicial discretion. ^{[3][4][12][13][14]}

The federal system offers an especially useful contrast. Federal courts generally refer to this as location monitoring rather than tethering, and they treat it as a court-imposed supervision tool that can include radio-frequency monitoring, GPS, or other technologies. But the federal model is more individualized and, at least on paper, more restrained. Judges impose it case by case as a condition of pretrial release, probation, home detention, or supervised release, guided by risk and supervision goals rather than by a broad, offense-based lifetime mandate. Federal guidance also expressly states that location monitoring is not a guarantee against new crime and is not a substitute for supervision, and federal materials indicate officers are not watching every movement in real time around the clock. Recent federal oversight reports emphasize alert fatigue, staffing burdens, connection failures, and employment obstacles for monitored individuals. Compared with that framework, Michigan’s lifetime tether regime looks more categorical, more permanent, and less tied to ongoing reassessment of whether the person still needs round-the-clock tracking years or decades after release. ^{[12][15][16][17]}

State and Federal Regulatory and Judicial Activity

Michigan is currently experiencing more judicial and adjacent legislative movement than direct statutory reform of the tether program itself. On the legislative side, Senate Bill 424 of 2025 would revise parts of the Sex Offenders Registration Act, including review procedures and treatment of some out-of-state convictions. That bill does not directly rewrite the lifetime electronic monitoring statutes, but it reflects ongoing pressure to make Michigan’s broader sex-offense supervision system more reviewable and more legally durable. On the judicial side, litigation has continued to test whether lifetime electronic monitoring can survive modern constitutional scrutiny when it is imposed automatically, without individualized risk findings and without a meaningful mechanism for removal. Earlier Michigan cases treated lifetime monitoring as a required part of the sentence, but more recent constitutional litigation has pressed the questions of proportionality, punishment, and unreasonable search with greater force. ^{[3][4][21][22][23]}

At the federal level, the picture is different because SORNA is primarily a registration and notification framework, not a national GPS tether mandate. Federal law, regulations, and SMART Office guidance create minimum national standards for who must register, what information must be reported, how often people must appear, and how jurisdictions share and disclose information. But those standards do not establish a uniform federal lifetime ankle-monitoring program for all covered offenders. Instead, federal location monitoring remains largely a supervision tool used case by case in pretrial services, probation, and supervised release. Recent federal activity has therefore focused less on expanding tethering and more on administering SORNA, tracking implementation across jurisdictions, and improving the management of federal location monitoring programs. Oversight materials from the Government Accountability Office have emphasized staffing strain, alert management, and data quality, while proposed supervised-release reforms would move the federal system further toward individualized assessment and earlier termination when continued supervision is not necessary. ^{[12][15][16][24][25][26]}

The gap between Michigan’s lifetime tether regime and the federal model is, at least for now, growing rather than shrinking. Michigan still relies on offense-based lifetime monitoring rules that can operate automatically and indefinitely, while the federal system is moving rhetorically and institutionally toward individualized supervision, workload triage, and periodic reassessment. At the same time, the gap between states remains wide because SORNA standardizes registration far more than it standardizes tethering. That leaves a major policy vacuum: two people with similar histories may face radically different GPS burdens depending on the state in which they live. There is a strong argument for more uniform baseline regulations regarding tethering, especially if electronic monitoring is going to be justified as a public-safety measure rather than simply an add-on punishment. Those baseline rules should include clear accuracy and alert standards, transparency about fees and vendor contracts, due-process protections for technical violations, periodic individualized review, and a meaningful path off lifetime monitoring when risk demonstrably declines. A uniform framework would not require every state to impose the same level of surveillance, but it could prevent the current patchwork in which the federal SORNA system promotes national consistency in registration while leaving electronic monitoring to fragment into dramatically different and sometimes constitutionally vulnerable state regimes. ^{[3][4][15][21][24][25][26]}

Does It Make Anyone Safer? And Does Lifetime Tether Cause More Harm Than Good?

The most defensible answer to whether GPS monitoring makes anyone safer is: sometimes, but only under limited conditions. It can improve supervision by making some kinds of noncompliance visible, helping agents enforce boundaries, and possibly deterring some people from violating rules or approaching prohibited locations. In that narrow sense, it may improve safety for some victims and communities. But the evidence does not support treating GPS as a magic shield. A bracelet does not create housing, treatment, employment, accountability, or meaningful rehabilitation. Safety improves most when monitoring is targeted, temporary, proportionate, and combined with human support and careful judgment rather than used as a substitute for them. ^{[1][7][8][10]}

As for lifetime tethering, the case against it is stronger. A sanction that follows a person until death, without an individualized off-ramp tied to demonstrated rehabilitation and actual risk, can easily become more punitive than protective. Lifetime monitoring may create ongoing stigma, recurring fees, technical violations, employment barriers, and psychological strain long after the period of highest risk has passed. It can consume public resources indefinitely while offering diminishing returns. For a small number of people in narrow circumstances, long-term GPS may still be defended as a precaution. But as a blanket or near-automatic policy, tether for life risks confusing surveillance with safety. If Michigan wants a system that truly protects the public, it should ask harder questions about proportionality, reviewability, transparency, cost, and whether permanent tracking is solving a real danger or simply extending punishment by electronic means. ^{[3][4][8][9][10][11]}

References

Michigan Department of Corrections, Policy Directive 06.03.105, Electronic Monitoring of Offenders.
Michigan Department of Corrections, Policy Directive 06.04.100, Lifetime Electronic Monitoring of Sex Offenders.
Michigan Compiled Laws 791.285, Lifetime Electronic Monitoring Program.
Michigan Compiled Laws 750.520n, Lifetime Electronic Monitoring.
State of Michigan, GPS Tether Violation Alert Definitions, including alert and zone categories for GPS monitoring equipment.
Michigan Department of Corrections, Policy Directive 06.02.110, Supervision Fees; see also MCL 791.236a regarding parole supervision fees with and without electronic monitoring devices.
National Institute of Justice, Electronic Monitoring Reduces Recidivism (2011).
Bales, Mann, Blomberg, Gaes, Barrick, Dhungana, and McManus, A Quantitative and Qualitative Assessment of Electronic Monitoring, National Institute of Justice final report (2010).
Pew Charitable Trusts, Policy Reforms Can Strengthen Community Supervision (2020).
George Washington University Law research summarized in Electronic Prisons: The Operation of Ankle Monitoring in the Criminal Legal System (2021), as reported by GW Today.
Fines and Fees Justice Center, Electronic Monitoring Fees: A 50-State Survey of the Costs Assessed to People on E-Supervision (2022).
United States Courts, Federal Location Monitoring, and Location Monitoring Reference Guide.
Vera Institute of Justice, People on Electronic Monitoring (2024).
International Association of Chiefs of Police, Tracking Sex Offenders with Electronic Monitoring Technology: Implications and Practical Uses for Law Enforcement (2008).
U.S. Government Accountability Office, Pretrial Supervision: Actions Needed to Enhance Management of the Location Monitoring Program, GAO-23-105873 (2023).
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Division of Adult Parole Operations, Electronic Monitoring and related sex-offender parole materials.
California Office of the Inspector General, Assessment of Electronic Monitoring of Sex Offenders on Parole and the Impact of Residency Restrictions (2014).
Heaton, Harold I., GPS Monitoring Practices in Community Supervision and the Potential Impact of Advanced Analytics, National Institute of Justice (2016).
Brown, McCabe, and Wellford, Global Positioning System (GPS) Technology for Community Supervision: Lessons Learned, National Institute of Justice / Noblis (2007).
Research on GNSS performance in urban canyon environments, including signal blockage, multipath, and reduced satellite visibility in dense city settings.
Michigan Senate Bill 424 of 2025 and related Senate Fiscal Agency analysis.
Michigan Supreme Court and Court of Appeals materials concerning lifetime electronic monitoring, including People v. Kardasz, People v. Martin, and People v. Hallak.
Michigan Courts benchbook materials on lifetime electronic monitoring, including statutory scope and sentencing treatment.
SMART Office, SORNA; U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Division, Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA).
28 C.F.R. Part 72, Sex Offender Registration and Notification.
SMART Office, Case Law Summary and implementation materials concerning legal challenges, federal standards, and jurisdictional compliance.
Federal supervised-release reform proposals, including the Safer Supervision Act of 2025.
Reference 1: National Electronic Monitoring Figures from Berg Insite, Electronic Offender Monitoring Solutions (4th Edition), 2026.
Reference 2: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Surveillance, Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) ICE Alternatives to Detention: Latest Data Tracking, 2024
Reference 3: Regional Density and Monitoring Impacts, Electronic Frontier Foundation, : Street Level Surveillance: Electronic Monitoring, 2023
Reference 4: Michigan State Tracking Statistics, Michigan Department of Corrections, Electronic Monitoring Center Program Operations Overview, 2022
https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/electronic-offender-monitoring-solution-market-35874
https://www.vera.org/jail-incarceration-in-wayne-county-michigan/reducing-the-use-of-pretrial-electronic-monitoring

Reform Solitary Confinement Practices in Michigan Prisons Now!

May is Unlock the Box Mental Health Awareness Month. The Unlock the Box Campaign is a coalition of organizations and movement leaders who partner with state and local campaigns across the United States with the common goal of ending the use of solitary confinement for all people. Currently active in 22 states and the District of Columbia, including Michigan. Open MI Door is the organization leading the fight in Michigan. OMD is seeking to affect policies and practices in all Michigan prisons, jails, and juvenile facilities. Current focus is on ensuring transparency, accountability, and independent oversight in the use of isolation and in conditions of confinement in general.

The statistics regarding the effects of solitary confinement are alarming. Right now, there are at least 122,000 people being held in solitary confinement in the United States. Over a third of people subjected to solitary confinement become psychotic and/or suicidal within the first 15 days. Individuals who have been in solitary confinement are 78% more likely to commit suicide within a year of their release from prison.

The Michigan Department of Corrections, or MDOC, does not usually use the phrase “solitary confinement” in its internal rules. Instead, it describes the practice as “segregation” or “restrictive housing.” That language matters, because bureaucratic terms can make an extreme practice sound routine. But the reality described in the department’s own policy materials and in the references collected here is unmistakable: segregation means isolating people from the general prison population, often for 23 to 24 hours a day, with sharply restricted movement, limited human contact, and minimal access to ordinary programming. MDOC policy presents segregation as a management tool used for discipline, control, and protection, while critics argue that it functions as a deeply harmful form of isolation that causes lasting psychological damage and undermines rehabilitation.

Michigan’s system illustrates the central contradiction in the national debate over solitary confinement. Prison administrators defend segregation as necessary in some cases to manage violence, serious misconduct, escape risk, or threats to vulnerable prisoners. At the same time, decades of reporting, advocacy, and international human-rights standards have increasingly challenged prolonged isolation as unsafe, inequitable, and incompatible with basic human dignity. Even MDOC’s own reporting shows that the department has sharply reduced administrative segregation over time, suggesting that the state itself recognizes that heavy reliance on this practice is neither inevitable nor desirable. The question is no longer whether segregation is severe. The question is whether Michigan should continue to rely on it in its current form. The strongest answer, based on the material in this document and the cited sources, is no: prolonged segregation should be discontinued and replaced with tightly limited, reviewable, therapeutic, and safety-focused alternatives.

What Segregation Means in the MDOC

According to MDOC policy, segregation is not a single category but a system with several forms. Temporary segregation is short-term isolation used while staff investigate alleged misconduct or await a hearing. Punitive segregation is imposed as a disciplinary sanction after a person is found guilty of a major misconduct violation. Administrative segregation is the most troubling category because it can become long-term. It is reserved for people that the department considers serious threats to institutional safety, major escape risks, unmanageable in general population, or in need of protective separation. On paper, each category has a different purpose. In practice, all three involve versions of extreme separation from ordinary prison life.

The living conditions are severe. People in long-term segregation may spend nearly the entire day alone in a cell of roughly 70 to 80 square feet. Human interaction is drastically limited. When they leave the cell, they may be shackled. Exercise is restricted and often takes place in enclosed spaces rather than meaningful recreation areas. Meals are delivered through a slot in the door. Showers and other basic activities are tightly controlled. These are not incidental inconveniences. They are the core features of an environment built around deprivation, surveillance, and social isolation.

What a typical solitary confinement cell looks like.

MDOC also emphasizes that segregation is regulated through reviews. Placement decisions are supposed to be examined by a housing unit team, the Security Classification Committee, wardens, and in longer cases higher-level administrators. Those review requirements are important, but they do not erase the underlying harm of isolation. The system can be procedurally structured and still be substantively damaging. If the practical result is that a person spends months or years in near-total isolation, repeated reviews do not change the nature of the confinement. They only document it.

Why MDOC Uses Segregation

MDOC’s own policy language makes its rationale clear. Segregation is used, in the department’s words, to achieve effective administrative management, maximum disciplinary control, and individual prisoner protection. That means the practice is justified on three main grounds. First, it is used as punishment for major misconduct. Second, it is used as a security tool when officials believe someone presents a danger to staff or other incarcerated people. Third, it is used, at least sometimes, to separate people who may themselves be at risk of harm in the general population.

Those reasons are not frivolous. Prisons are coercive environments, and correctional administrators are responsible for preventing violence and responding to emergencies. There are situations in which immediate separation is necessary. A person who has just committed a serious assault, threatened staff, or faces a credible risk of being attacked may need to be removed quickly from the general population. Any honest analysis should acknowledge that reality. The problem is that a short-term emergency separation tool is not the same thing as a long-term isolation regime. What may be justified for hours or days becomes far harder to justify when it stretches into weeks, months, or years.

Michigan’s own recent policy developments suggest that the state understands this distinction. The department has reported large reductions in segregation since 2008 and has developed Structured Alternative to Administrative Segregation (START) units as alternatives for some prisoners with serious mental illness. Those reforms implicitly recognize that segregation has often been overused and that at least some of the people once held there can be managed differently. If safer alternatives exist for many cases, then prolonged segregation is less a necessity than a policy choice.

What the Outcomes Show

One of the clearest outcomes in the record is that Michigan has reduced its use of administrative segregation substantially. The data table shows a decline from 479,791 total segregation days and a daily average population of 1,314 in fiscal year 2007–2008 to 102,395 days and a daily average of 281 in 2024–2025. That is a dramatic drop. It undermines any claim that Michigan must rely on segregation at the levels it once did. If the prison system can function with far fewer people in administrative segregation than it held there in 2008, then the older level of use was not an unavoidable feature of prison management. It was an institutional practice that could be changed.

At the same time, a reduction in volume does not resolve the moral and practical concerns. Hundreds of people are still held in administrative segregation, and some remain there for periods exceeding 3, 6, or 12 months. That matters because the harms of segregation are not measured only by how many people are isolated, but also by how long the isolation lasts. The United Nations Nelson Mandela Rules define solitary confinement as confinement for 22 hours or more a day without meaningful human contact, define prolonged solitary confinement as anything beyond 15 consecutive days, and prohibit indefinite and prolonged solitary confinement as inconsistent with minimum standards for humane treatment. Michigan’s own reports showing people in segregation for months or longer place the state in direct tension with those standards.

The human outcomes described in the references are equally serious. Advocates, family reports, legal analyses, and broader research on solitary confinement consistently associate prolonged isolation with anxiety, depression, cognitive deterioration, self-harm risk, hopelessness, and worsening symptoms for people with mental illness or developmental disabilities. Even when corrections officials present segregation as a safety measure, the evidence suggests that isolation can destabilize the very people the institution is trying to manage. That creates a damaging cycle: distress leads to misconduct, misconduct leads to more isolation, and more isolation deepens distress.

There are also broader institutional outcomes. Segregation can make reentry into the general prison population harder by eroding social functioning and increasing distrust. It can also make release into the community more dangerous when people leave prison directly from highly isolating conditions without adequate step-down support. And the practice appears to fall unevenly across the prison population. The materials in this document point to racial disparities in segregation use, with Black men overrepresented in segregated housing compared with their share of the overall prison population. That raises an additional reform concern: segregation is not only severe but may also be administered inequitably.

Additional support for ending prolonged segregation comes from the Unlock the Box campaign, a national coalition focused on abolishing solitary confinement in the United States. The campaign argues that solitary is not only harmful but also counterproductive. Its public materials describe solitary confinement as extreme isolation for 22 or more hours a day, note that an estimated 85 percent of people in solitary are there for nonviolent disciplinary reasons, and report that as many as one-half of those in solitary live with mental illness that isolation can worsen. Unlock the Box also emphasizes that prolonged solitary confinement does not make prisons or communities safer, and that people of color are disproportionately subjected to it beyond their already disproportionate representation in prison populations. Those points reinforce the case that prolonged segregation in Michigan should not be treated as an unfortunate but necessary norm; it should be understood as a policy choice with predictable harms and unequal effects that demand correction.

Segregation and Human Rights

The international human-rights case against prolonged segregation is powerful and increasingly specific. The United Nations Nelson Mandela Rules do not treat isolation as a neutral administrative option. They treat it as a practice requiring strict limits because of its potential to become cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. Under those rules, prolonged solitary confinement means more than 15 consecutive days, and indefinite solitary confinement is prohibited. The rules also emphasize that solitary confinement should be used only in exceptional cases, as a last resort, for the shortest possible time, and subject to independent review. They further state that it should not be used when a prisoner’s mental or physical disability would be exacerbated by the measure.

Measured against that standard, Michigan’s regime raises serious concerns. The state may call the practice administrative segregation, temporary segregation, or punitive segregation, but a change in terminology does not change the lived reality of isolation. If a person is locked down for 22 to 24 hours a day with little meaningful human contact, then the practice falls within the human-rights framework developed by the United Nations. And if that confinement continues for months, as Michigan’s own reports show happens in some cases, then the state is operating beyond the threshold the Mandela Rules identify as prolonged solitary confinement.

Some defenders of the current system argue that prison safety justifies these departures. Safety is important, but human-rights standards already account for that argument. The Mandela Rules do not forbid every temporary emergency separation. They forbid turning isolation into a routine or open-ended instrument of prison governance. That distinction is crucial. A correctional system can protect staff and prisoners while still rejecting prolonged solitary confinement. In fact, Michigan’s own reduction in segregation usage suggests that reform is compatible with institutional order. The human-rights issue is therefore not whether prison officials ever need tools for emergency separation. It is whether the state should keep using prolonged isolation after it knows the damage it causes and after alternatives have already been shown to exist.

Should Michigan Discontinue Segregation?

If the question means whether Michigan should eliminate every form of temporary emergency separation, the answer is probably no. Prisons need a narrow capacity to separate people immediately after violence, during investigations, or when a person faces an imminent threat. But if the question is whether Michigan should discontinue prolonged segregation as a standing correctional practice, the answer should be yes. Long-term isolation should end.

There are several reasons for that conclusion. First, the harms are too severe. Segregation can intensify mental distress, undermine stability, and damage the social capacities people need both inside prison and after release. Second, the practice is inconsistent with modern human-rights standards once it extends beyond very short periods. Third, the state’s own declining segregation numbers show that Michigan can reduce its use substantially without abandoning prison administration altogether. Fourth, indefinite or months-long isolation invites arbitrary and unequal outcomes, especially where racial disparities and mental health concerns are already present.

Discontinuing prolonged segregation does not mean ignoring violence or misconduct. It means replacing a blunt and damaging tool with more precise responses: short emergency separation, intensive mental-health intervention, structured step-down units, restorative or behavior-based programming, and individualized safety planning for those who need protection. A prison system committed to safety should prefer methods that reduce future harm rather than deepen it.

What Reform Should Look Like

Real reform in Michigan should begin with a clear legal time limit that brings state practice closer to the Mandela Rules. The legislature should prohibit prolonged solitary confinement, ban indefinite segregation, and require meaningful out-of-cell time, programming, and regular independent review for anyone held apart from the general population. People with serious mental illness, developmental disabilities, and other especially vulnerable conditions should not be placed in isolating units that predictably worsen their condition.

Reform should also require transparency. Michigan already reports some segregation data, but durable accountability needs more than aggregate totals. Public reporting should include duration, facility-level usage, demographic patterns, mental-health status, reasons for placement, and release pathways from segregation. The point of transparency is not only to monitor numbers; it is to expose whether the system is relying on isolation as a substitute for staffing, treatment, training, or conflict resolution.

Finally, reform must include culture change. Segregation survives not only because policies authorize it, but because institutions become accustomed to treating isolation as normal. That habit is hard to break. Michigan should invest in staff training, behavioral de-escalation, therapeutic housing, and transition units that prepare people to return safely to prison programming and eventually to the community. If the state is serious about rehabilitation, it cannot continue to rely on a practice that strips people of meaningful human contact and then expects them to emerge healthier, safer, or more prepared for life after incarceration.

Unlock the Box also helps clarify what reform can look like in practice. Its campaign materials highlight legislative approaches that prohibit solitary confinement beyond 15 days in line with the Mandela Rules, create independent oversight, protect vulnerable groups, and in some proposals reduce isolation for emergency de-escalation to only a few hours while requiring safe and humane alternatives. That framework supports a practical reform agenda for Michigan: narrow the grounds for separation, impose strict time caps, expand therapeutic and program-rich alternatives, increase meaningful out-of-cell time, and ensure that any temporary separation is genuinely brief and tied to a clear transition plan back to less restrictive conditions.

Segregation in the Michigan Department of Corrections was built on the idea that isolation can produce order. The evidence suggests something more complicated and more troubling: isolation may sometimes create temporary control, but it does so at high human cost and with serious legal and moral consequences. Michigan has already shown that it can reduce segregation. The next step is to go further by ending prolonged isolation, preserving only tightly limited emergency separation, and building a correctional system centered on safety, treatment, accountability, and human dignity.

Open MI Door is fighting for the passage of bill SB493, which seeks to expand the powers and duties of the Legislative Corrective Ombudsperson’s Office as a meaningful step forward in bringing our state into full compliance with the UN’s Mandela Rules. If you know someone in prison or who has been in prison check out the mental health resources available on the OMD website.

References

Michigan Department of Corrections. Policy Directive 04.05.120: Segregation Standards. Effective June 1, 2019.

Michigan Department of Corrections. Report to the Legislature: Administrative Segregation Report. March 30, 2026.

United Nations General Assembly. United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules), A/RES/70/175. January 8, 2016.

U.S. Department of Justice. Report and Recommendations Concerning the Use of Restrictive Housing. January 2016.

Luigi, M., Dellazizzo, L., Giguère, C.-É., Goulet, M.-H., & Dumais, A. “Shedding Light on ‘the Hole’: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis on Adverse Psychological Effects and Mortality Following Solitary Confinement in Correctional Settings.” Frontiers in Psychiatry, 11 (2020).

Vera Institute of Justice. The Impacts of Solitary Confinement. April 2021.

Unlock the Box Campaign. About Us; Resources: Solitary by the Numbers; and Experience. Accessed May 16, 2026.

https://unlocktheboxcampaign.org

https://openmidoor.org/

Locked Down: How Prison Lockdowns Undermine Mental Health and Rehabilitation in U.S. Prisons

Lockdowns are supposed to keep prisons safe. Too often, they function as mass isolation: damaging mental health, stalling rehabilitation, and deepening a humanitarian crisis.

During my 8 years of incarceration, I experienced numerous lockdown events. It could be due to a fight in the yard or chow hall, an outbreak of an infectious disease like Norovirus, or a security sweep for weapons and contraband. It might last for a few hours to a few days. A security sweep might result in my property being tossed like a fruit salad onto my bed and my body strip searched, but that was the extent of my inconvenience. My few delayed meals or a sack lunch, a few missed shifts as a school tutor, canceled medical or library callouts, even a few missed visits do not begin to compare to what is happening now across the country. Lockdowns were just part of the prison experience, but that all changed with Covid-19.

My wife is a Medical Assistant and was hired during Covid to work in the state prison near our house. During the pandemic everything changed. Just like out in the world, prisons went into complete lockdown. No prisoner movement. What necessary minimal services like medical came to the housing units. All offsite prisoner transport stopped. No visits, no school or programing, no yard, weight pit of gym callouts, no church services or outside volunteers. Prisoners were not allowed to interact with other people from outside their housing units. The routine upon which prison is built was stopped completely. In most prisons this condition lasted not for a couple of months, but for over a year. In a previous blog post entitled Anti-Social Distancing I wrote about the devastating effects that the pandemic had on prisoners. The ripple effects of that time still reverberate in prisons.

In many U.S. prisons, “lockdown” no longer describes a rare emergency response to a riot or a narrowly targeted security incident. It has become a recurring operational mode: housing units sealed, movement halted, yard and dayroom time canceled, phones restricted, visits suspended, and education, treatment, and job assignments paused—sometimes for days, weeks, or even months. Reporting in recent years has documented extended lockdowns tied not only to violence but also to chronic understaffing and overcrowding, raising a stark question: When a prison can’t run its basic schedule safely, are we still operating a rehabilitative institution or merely warehousing human beings behind steel doors? [1]

What a Prison Lockdown Actually Means

Lockdowns vary by facility, custody level, and the event that triggered them. But in practice, a lockdown is a temporary suspension of normal movement and routines—often applied to an entire housing unit or whole prison—so staff can regain control, search for contraband, respond to violence, manage a shortage of officers, or contain disease outbreaks. Some lockdowns allow limited “controlled movement” (brief showers, medication lines, or staggered recreation). Others are near-total confinement to cell, with meals delivered to doors, minimal human contact, and sharply reduced access to healthcare, law library, religious services, and family contact.

Even when it is not formally “solitary confinement,” a prolonged lockdown can replicate many of the same risk factors: sensory deprivation, social isolation, loss of autonomy, and the collapse of predictable routines that help people regulate stress. That overlap matters because research on restrictive housing and solitary confinement consistently links extreme isolation to psychological deterioration, self-harm, and elevated suicide risk.

Mental Health: Why Lockdowns Hurt So Much

People enter prisons with high rates of mental illness and trauma histories, and many facilities already struggle to meet their clinical needs. The Prison Policy Initiative’s research library summarizes how common mental health diagnoses are in custody and how gaps in treatment persist. In that environment, lockdowns act like gasoline on a smoldering fire: they intensify stressors while simultaneously cutting off the very support: structured activity, social contact, counseling, movement, sunlight, and exercise that can keep symptoms from spiraling. [10]

Loss of routine and control: Predictability is a core mental-health stabilizer. Lockdowns replace schedules with uncertainty—When will the door open? Will medication be on time? Will family calls work today?
Isolation and conflict: Confinement increases loneliness and rumination, but it can also increase tension with cellmates in cramped spaces, producing hypervigilance and sleep disruption.
Reduced physical activity: Yard closures and canceled recreation remove one of the most accessible mood regulators.
Disrupted healthcare access: Even brief interruptions in psychiatric care, counseling, and medication continuity can trigger withdrawal, relapse, or acute crises.
Family separation: Suspended visitation and restricted phone access remove a major buffer against despair—especially for parents.

We should be careful with language: lockdowns and solitary confinement are not identical. Still, a large body of evidence on solitary confinement provides a warning label for prolonged, near-total lockdown conditions. A major systematic review and meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychiatry found solitary confinement was associated with adverse psychological effects and higher risks of self-harm and mortality, especially suicide. When whole housing units are kept in conditions that approximate isolation, it is reasonable to expect similar patterns—particularly among people with preexisting mental illness. [3]

Lockdowns also leave residue. After weeks of enforced inactivity, people may emerge dysregulated—more irritable, less trusting, and more prone to impulsive behavior. That dysregulation can feed a vicious loop: tension increases, violence increases, administrators respond with more lockdown, and the psychological and social environment degrades further. Meanwhile, the skills needed for successful reentry: emotion regulation, conflict resolution, consistent participation in treatment—are precisely the skills lockdowns erode.

Rehabilitation: Lockdowns Don’t Just Pause Programs—They Break Them

Education classes, vocational training, substance use treatment groups, cognitive behavioral programs, faith-based services, work assignments, and reentry planning often depend on predictable movement and staff availability. Lockdowns disrupt all of it. Even “temporary” cancellations can have outsized effects because correctional programming is built on momentum: attendance requirements, sequential curricula, waitlists, and limited seats. Miss enough sessions, and a person can lose their spot—then wait months to re-enroll, if they can at all.

This isn’t a minor inconvenience. Research syntheses and policy reviews consistently find that prison programming, especially education and job training, can reduce recidivism and improve post-release employment. RAND’s work on correctional education summarizes evidence that educating incarcerated people improves post-release outcomes, and federal reviews describe programming as a key lever for reducing reoffending. When lockdowns suspend programming, they effectively suspend one of the few tools’ prisons have to make future communities safer. [8] [9]

Lockdowns also damage the human infrastructure of rehabilitation: relationships. Family visitation is often suspended, and calls may be limited or unreliable. Staff may interact with incarcerated people primarily through orders and door slots. Over time, this can shift the culture from “managed community” toward “permanent crisis mode.” Recent accounts describe facilities held in extended lockdown conditions because agencies lack enough staff to safely run normal schedules—an operational failure with deep human costs.

Are Lockdowns Increasing? What U.S. Data Shows—and What It Doesn’t

If you’re looking for a single national dataset that tracks the frequency and duration of prison lockdowns across all U.S. state and federal facilities over decades, you’ll quickly hit a wall: lockdowns are not consistently defined, measured, or publicly reported across jurisdictions. National statistical agencies such as the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) produce detailed annual reports on prison and jail populations, admissions, staffing, and mortality, but “lockdown-days per facility per year” is not a standard published metric. The Prison Policy Initiative even maintains resources explaining that many commonly requested criminal-justice datasets simply don’t exist in unified form—lockdowns being a prime example. [10] Here is one of the few examples from the Illinois Department of Corrections.

Example of lockdown data from the Illinois Department of Corrections for FY2020 to FY2025 showing the marked recent increase in lockdowns.

Still, we can responsibly analyze lockdown trends by triangulating from: (1) periods when lockdowns were system-wide (notably the COVID-19 era), (2) staffing and overcrowding indicators that predict operational lockdowns, and (3) investigative reporting and oversight findings documenting prolonged, non-emergency lockdown use. Note that throughout this article I have specifically included a series of images related to two state prisons in Wisconsin that made the news due to public protests regarding prolonged lockdowns and prison conditions.

1) The COVID-19 Shock: Lockdown as Public-Health Control

From March 2020 through early 2021, many prisons entered “modified operations” that resembled extended lockdowns: movement restrictions, suspended visitation, reduced programming, and quarantine/isolation practices. BJS documented the broader system impacts of the pandemic in prisons—including testing, infections, deaths, and major shifts in admissions and releases—showing how deeply COVID-19 altered daily operations behind bars. [4] Refer to my post Speech-less to read about the devastating effect that Covid-19 had on those incarcerated at that time.

Federal oversight also highlighted the mental-health danger of pandemic isolation. In a capstone review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ COVID-19 response, the DOJ Office of the Inspector General reported that the BOP told investigators that seven incarcerated people died by suicide from March 2020 through April 2021 while housed in single-cell confinement in quarantine units related to COVID-19—an alarming signal of how extreme isolation can interact with crisis stress. The OIG also described staffing shortages and morale challenges during the pandemic. [5]

At the time the BOP published facility-level COVID-19 statistics, which helped document disease burden and operational strain. That reporting was quickly ended even before the pandemic was declared over and the information was never translated into a standardized national ledger of lockdown frequency and duration.

2) The Staffing Squeeze: Lockdown as a Substitute for Adequate Operations

Outside of pandemic emergencies, one of the most commonly cited drivers of extended lockdowns is understaffing. When there aren’t enough officers to safely escort people to chow, yard, school, or the clinic, prisons cut movement. In its analysis of the national staffing crisis, the Prison Policy Initiative argues that understaffing becomes a self-reinforcing loop: fewer staff leads to more restrictive conditions and fewer services; conditions worsen; violence rises; staff burnout increases; recruitment becomes harder; and lockdown becomes routine. [2]

Data-driven reporting has underscored how severe the staffing decline has been. The Marshall Project reported that state correctional workforces dropped sharply after 2019, reaching the lowest mark in more than two decades in 2022, while many state prison populations began rebounding—creating a mismatch between staffing capacity and operational demands. In that context, lockdown becomes a predictable management response rather than an exceptional security measure. [6]

Stateline’s national reporting similarly describes prolonged lockdowns, sometimes lasting weeks or months—linked to understaffing and overcrowding, not disciplinary need. The key trend described is not necessarily “more lockdown events,” but longer lockdowns and more frequent reliance on lockdown-like restrictions as a default operating posture. [1]

Talib Akbar speaks during an Oct. 10, 2023, protest at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Wis. WISDOM, a statewide faith-based social justice organization, organized the protest. Akbar was incarcerated for 20 years before his release in 2013 and spent at least 10 stints in solitary confinement, including a stretch lasting nearly a year. WISDOM and partner organizations called on the short-staffed Wisconsin Department of Corrections to lift restrictions on prisoner movement, reduce the prison population and invest in community-based programs that aid prisoner rehabilitation. (Meryl Hubbard / Wisconsin Watch)

3) Security Threats: Contraband, Drugs, Phones, and Violence

Lockdowns are also frequently used after violent incidents, when administrators suspect weapons, or when contraband flows overwhelm routine searches. A National Institute of Justice summary of a RAND-facilitated workshop on correctional security threats ranked insufficient staffing as the top concern among experts, with contraband (drugs, weapons, cellphones) generating the largest number of priority needs. Each of these threats can precipitate facility-wide shakedowns and movement freezes, especially when an agency lacks the personnel and technology to target responses precisely. [7]

So, are lockdowns increasing? We cannot prove a clean nationwide time-series increase in lockdown frequency and duration because the U.S. lacks standardized, publicly reported lockdown metrics across prisons. But multiple converging indicators suggest a real shift toward more extended lockdown conditions since 2020: pandemic-era modified operations, followed by persistent staffing shortages and overcrowding pressures that make normal programming schedules difficult to sustain. The lived reality described by oversight bodies and national reporting is consistent with longer and more routine restrictions—even if the number of discrete “lockdown events” is not measured uniformly.

Underlying Causes: Why Lockdowns Keep Spreading

Chronic understaffing and burnout: When posts go unfilled and overtime becomes constant, prisons cannot safely move large groups. Lockdown becomes the operational workaround. [1] [2] [6]
Overcrowding and facility design: Crowded units, dorm settings, and aging infrastructure make it harder to separate conflicts, quarantine illness, or run staggered movement without enormous staffing. [1]
Contraband markets and violence cycles: Illicit phones, drugs (including opioids), and weapons drive shakedowns and retaliatory violence, often followed by facility-wide lockdown. [7]
Policy incentives that favor control over care: It is administratively easier to cancel activities than to build staffing, training, clinical capacity, and targeted security approaches.
Unmet mental health and substance use needs: When treatment access is thin, crises escalate; crises prompt lockdowns; lockdowns worsen mental health; and the cycle continues. [3] [10]

Protesters call on the short-staffed Wisconsin Department of Corrections to improve prisoner conditions and lift restrictions on prisoners’ movement during a protest at the Wisconsin State Capitol on Oct. 10, 2023, in Madison, Wis. *Meryl Hubbard/Wisconsin Watch*

What Can Be Done: A Humane, Evidence-Based Path Out of the Lockdown Spiral

Calling this a “humanitarian crisis” is not hyperbole: prolonged, population-wide confinement in stressful environments predictably harms mental health and sabotages rehabilitation. The good news is that the solutions are not mysterious. They require political will, operational discipline, and transparency.

Measure lockdowns—then publish the numbers. States and the federal system should track at minimum: lockdown start/end times, scope (unit vs. facility), reason codes, services suspended, and out-of-cell hours provided. Without data, the public can’t distinguish emergency necessity from routine deprivation. (The current lack of standardized lockdown metrics is a central barrier to trend analysis.) [10]
Set enforceable limits and minimum conditions. Even during lockdowns, people should receive daily out-of-cell time, access to showers, medical and mental health care, and meaningful communication with counsel and family, with clear exceptions only for immediate, documented threats.
Stabilize staffing—but don’t pretend hiring alone can solve mass incarceration. The staffing crisis is real, but it is tightly linked to the scale of incarceration. Breaking the cycle means improving working conditions (training, safety, schedules, pay) while also reducing the incarcerated population so staffing ratios are feasible. [2] [6]
Protect program continuity as a public-safety priority. If education and treatment reduce recidivism, then suspending them for long periods should be treated as a risk to community safety. Build “lockdown-resilient” programming: cell-front coursework, tablet-based learning (where feasible), small-group controlled movement, and make-up sessions that prevent people from losing their place in sequenced programs. [8] [9]
Expand mental health support during and after lockdown periods. Lockdowns are predictable stress spikes. Facilities should implement surge mental-health checks, peer-support access, and rapid referral pathways during restrictions, especially for people with known risk factors for self-harm. The evidence linking extreme isolation to self-harm and suicide risk makes this essential. [3] [5]
Modernize contraband control without collective punishment. Targeted searches, intelligence-led investigations, and technologies aimed at drones and illicit phones can reduce the perceived need for sweeping lockdowns—while still addressing the very real threats highlighted by correctional security experts. [7]
Strengthen independent oversight. Prolonged lockdowns should trigger automatic external review: documentation of necessity, timeline for restoration of normal operations, and a plan for services. Oversight findings during COVID-19 show why independent scrutiny matters. [4] [5]

Conclusion: Safety Without Humanity Isn’t Safety

Lockdowns will always exist in some form; prisons are volatile places, and emergencies happen. The crisis is the normalization of lockdown as routine management, whether driven by pandemic protocols, staffing collapse, overcrowding, contraband economies, or a deeper policy choice to prioritize control over care. The mental-health consequences are predictable, and the rehabilitation costs are measurable in missed education, stalled treatment, and weakened family ties.

Because the United States does not systematically publish lockdown frequency and duration data across jurisdictions, we can’t chart a definitive national curve the way we can for incarceration rates or admissions. But the available evidence strongly suggests the experience of lockdown has intensified since 2020; first through widespread pandemic restrictions documented by BJS and federal oversight, then through persistent staffing and capacity failures that keep prisons from operating normally. Treating this as a humanitarian crisis starts with telling the truth in numbers: track lockdown-days, publish them, and make “days of life” behind bars a metric of accountability alongside safety. [4] [5] [1] [2] [10]

Endnotes

Stateline. Amanda Hernández (December 3, 2024). “State prisons turn to extended lockdowns amid staffing shortages, overcrowding.”
Prison Policy Initiative. Brian Nam-Sonenstein & Emmett Sanders (December 9, 2024). “Why jails and prisons can’t recruit their way out of the understaffing crisis.”
Luigi, M., Dellazizzo, L., Giguère, C.-É., Goulet, M.-H., & Dumais, A. (2020). “Shedding Light on ‘the Hole’: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis on Adverse Psychological Effects and Mortality Following Solitary Confinement in Correctional Settings.” Frontiers in Psychiatry, 11:840.
U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Carson, E. Ann; Nadel, Melissa; & Gaes, Gerry (August 2022; published August 25, 2022). Impact of COVID-19 on State and Federal Prisons, March 2020–February 2021 (NCJ 304500).
U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General (March 2023). Capstone Review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Response to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic (Report 23-054).
The Marshall Project. Shannon Heffernan & Weihua Li (January 10, 2024). “New Data Shows How Dire the Prison Staffing Shortage Really Is.”
National Institute of Justice (April 6, 2020). “Experts Identify Priority Needs for Addressing Correctional Agency Security Threats.”
RAND Corporation. Davis, L. M., Bozick, R., Steele, J. L., Saunders, J., & Miles, J. N. V. (2013). Evaluating the Effectiveness of Correctional Education: A Meta-Analysis of Programs That Provide Education to Incarcerated Adults (RR-266).
Office of Justice Programs / Federal Probation. Byrne, J. M. (2020/2022). “The Effectiveness of Prison Programming: A Review of the Research Literature Examining the Impact of Federal, State, and Local Inmate Programming on Post-Release Recidivism.”
Prison Policy Initiative. “Data toolbox” (includes guidance and a list of commonly requested data that doesn’t exist in unified form).

Why “Ban the Box” Is Not Enough

“Ban the Box” laws were created to stop employers from using a checkmark on an application as a shortcut for exclusion. By delaying questions about criminal history until later in the hiring process—often after an interview or even after a conditional offer—these policies aim to ensure candidates are first evaluated on skills and experience. But delaying the question is not the same as limiting how criminal history is used. In practice, many applicants are still screened out once background checks occur, often through broad, risk-averse policies that treat any record as disqualifying. And for some people—especially those affected by ongoing civil restrictions like sex offense registration—there may be no real “fresh start” because the punishment never truly ends. In short, Ban the Box is a helpful first step, but it is not enough to stop background checks from becoming a quiet, permanent barrier to employment.

Delaying the Question Does Not Change the Outcome

Most Ban the Box policies focus on timing: employers cannot ask about convictions on the initial application and must wait until later to run a background check. The federal government’s Fair Chance to Compete for Jobs Act of 2019 follows this same logic by generally prohibiting federal agencies (and contractors acting on their behalf) from requesting criminal history information until after a conditional offer.¹

However, the practical reality is that many employers simply move the “no” to a later stage. A conditional offer can be rescinded quickly once a screening report arrives, sometimes without any meaningful opportunity for the applicant to explain context, show rehabilitation, or point out inaccuracies. When a company’s policy is essentially “any record = unacceptable risk,” the box is gone but the barrier remains. Ban the Box can reduce early automatic rejection, yet it often leaves untouched the deeper problem: background checks are frequently used as an all-purpose tool to manage liability fears rather than as a targeted way to evaluate job-related risk.

Broad Background-Check Screens Still Exclude Qualified People

Even when employers wait to ask, the way they use the information can still be unfair and overly broad. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has warned that criminal-record exclusions may violate Title VII when they create unjustified disparate impact. The EEOC’s guidance encourages employers to use “targeted” exclusions tied to the job and to consider the “Green factors”—the nature and gravity of the offense, the time that has passed, and the nature of the job—often paired with an individualized assessment.²

But guidance is not the same as practice. Many employers still rely on blanket policies, vendor “risk scores,” or rigid lookback rules that do not match the actual duties of the role. This creates a system where someone can be excluded for a decades-old offense, for an arrest that did not lead to conviction, or for conduct that has little relationship to the work. If Ban the Box is the only reform, it may only delay the moment a broad screen is applied.

Ban the Box Can Shift Discrimination Instead of Reducing It

Another reason Ban the Box is not enough is that removing information early can sometimes encourage employers to guess. In a large field experiment, researchers found that when employers could not ask about records at the application stage, the gap in callbacks between White and Black applicants grew substantially at employers that changed their applications in response to Ban the Box.³ A review of the evidence has similarly raised concerns that Ban the Box can reduce opportunities for young Black and Latino men when employers engage in “statistical discrimination.”⁴

This does not mean Ban the Box should be abandoned; it means the policy must be paired with rules that structure how background information is evaluated and with strong anti-discrimination enforcement. Otherwise, the reform can unintentionally move bias earlier in the process, before a candidate ever gets the chance to be seen as an individual.

The Background-Check System Itself Is Error-Prone and Hard to Challenge

Ban the Box also does little to address the mechanics of the background-check industry. Many employers purchase “consumer reports” from third-party screening companies, and those reports can contain incomplete dispositions, mismatches, or other errors. When an employer plans to take adverse action based on a report, the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) requires procedural steps, including giving the applicant a copy of the report and a summary of rights before making a final decision.⁵

NOTICE TO CONSUMER REGARDING PUBLIC RECORD INFORMATION

DISA Global Solutions <noreply@clairiti.com> Wed, Oct 15, 2025 at 12:29PM

To: XXXXXX XXXXX XXXXXXXXXX

Dear Consumer:

The purpose of this email is to notify you that DISA Global Solutions (“DISA”) is reporting public record information about you that may be averse to the following company:

TRIGO Group
XXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXX, XX XXXXX
(XXX) XXX-XXXX

Please note: if the above listed company requested the report for employment purposes, it certified to DISA that it is using such public record information to determine your eligibility for employment, promotion, reassignment, and/or retention.

THIS EMAIL IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. DISA IS NOT INVOLVED IN ANY EMPLOYMENT-RELATED DECISION. THE COMPANY LISTED ABOVE IS NOT TAKING ANY ADVERSE ACTION AGAINST YOU AT THIS TIME.

If you would like a copy of your consumer report when it is completed and if you have not already requested a copy, you may do so by emailing screening.support@disa.com.

Yet those protections often do not feel like due process. A candidate may have only days to respond, may not know how to obtain court documentation, and may be facing multiple employers who all rely on the same flawed data. Meanwhile, the employer’s incentive is to fill the job quickly. As a result, even when the law requires notice, the practical effect can be fast rejection based on information that is outdated, misleading, or not the candidate’s record at all.

“Civil” Punishment Can Last Forever, Making Employment Exclusion Permanent

Ban the Box is also limited because it focuses mainly on criminal-history questions, not the broader ecosystem of collateral consequences that follow people long after they have completed their sentences. Sex offender registration is a powerful example. The U.S. Supreme Court has characterized some registration schemes as civil and nonpunitive, allowing them to apply retroactively and—in some cases—to last for decades or for life. In Smith v. Doe, the Court upheld Alaska’s registration law against an ex post facto challenge on the grounds that it was nonpunitive.⁶

When a consequence is labeled “civil,” it can avoid the ordinary idea that punishment should end. For registrants, there may be no meaningful statute of limitations on the stigma and restrictions that follow a conviction: public databases, ongoing reporting rules, and in some jurisdictions limits on where a person can live or work. Employers often treat registry status as a bright-line disqualifier, regardless of how long ago the offense occurred, what the person has done since, or whether the job has any connection to the underlying conduct. In that environment, removing a checkbox on an application does not create a fair chance—it simply delays an exclusion that is built into the structure of public labeling.

What Real Fair-Chance Hiring Requires

If the goal is to reduce lifetime exclusion and make employment decisions more accurate and job-related, Ban the Box must be paired with stronger protections. Reforms that move beyond timing include:

Job-related limits on disqualification: require employers to show that excluding someone is job-related and consistent with business necessity, using the nature of the offense, time passed, and nature of the job (the EEOC “Green factors”).²
Individualized assessment before rescinding an offer: require a documented review of the person’s circumstances and evidence of rehabilitation instead of blanket bans.²
Meaningful notice and a chance to respond: strengthen the practical enforcement of pre-adverse action procedures so applicants can correct errors and provide context before the final decision.⁵
Limits on the use of non-conviction information: restrict reliance on arrests that did not lead to conviction and require final disposition information where records are used.
Clear lookback limits: bar consideration of older convictions for most jobs unless directly relevant, recognizing that risk changes over time.
Pathways to relief: expand expungement, sealing, and certificates of rehabilitation so that completion of a sentence can actually lead to restored opportunity.
Registry reform where registration functions as perpetual punishment: provide realistic mechanisms for termination of registration duties and ensure that employment restrictions are narrowly tailored rather than automatic for life, consistent with the principle that civil regulation should not become endless exclusion.⁶

Conclusion

Ban the Box recognizes a real problem: early criminal-history questions invite stigma-based exclusion before a person’s qualifications are even considered. But it is not enough because it leaves employers free to disqualify candidates later through broad background-check screens, error-prone reporting, and policies driven by fear of liability rather than job-related evidence. It can even shift discrimination into less visible forms. Most importantly, it does not confront the reality that some “civil” consequences—like sex offense registration—can operate as punishment without an end date, turning the promise of a second chance into a permanent denial of work. A true fair-chance system must do more than remove a checkbox: it must set standards for how criminal history is evaluated, ensure accurate information and meaningful due process, and provide real pathways for people to move beyond their past.²⁵⁶

Notes

1. Fair Chance to Compete for Jobs Act of 2019 (also known as the “Fair Chance Act”), summary and text resources available via Congress.gov (S.387, 116th Cong.).

2. U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Enforcement Guidance on the Consideration of Arrest and Conviction Records in Employment Decisions under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (No. 915.002, Apr. 25, 2012).

3. Amanda Agan & Sonja Starr, “Ban the Box, Criminal Records, and Racial Discrimination: A Field Experiment,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, no. 1 (2018): 191–235.

4. Christina Stacy & Mychal Cohen, Ban the Box and Racial Discrimination: A Review of the Evidence and Policy Recommendations (Urban Institute, Feb. 2017).

5. Federal Trade Commission, “Using Consumer Reports: What Employers Need to Know” (guidance on Fair Credit Reporting Act compliance for employment decisions).

6. Smith v. Doe, 538 U.S. 84 (2003) (holding Alaska’s sex offender registration act was nonpunitive for ex post facto purposes).

April Is Second Chance Month: Why It Matters More Than Ever

Every April, communities across the United States pause to recognize a powerful truth: No one should be defined forever by their worst mistake. April is Second Chance Month, a nationwide effort to raise awareness of the barriers facing people with criminal records and to promote policies and practices that support successful reentry, restoration, and community safety.

A Movement Rooted in Dignity and Opportunity

Second Chance Month was founded in 2017 by Prison Fellowship, the nation’s largest Christian nonprofit serving currently and formerly incarcerated people and their families. The initiative highlights a sobering reality: nearly 1 in 3 American adults has a criminal record, and many face lifelong obstacles long after completing their sentence. These barriers now numbering close to 44,000 legal restrictions nationwide, can limit access to employment, housing, education, and even basic civic participation.

Over the years, Second Chance Month has grown into a broad, bipartisan movement. Presidential proclamations have been issued consistently since 2018, and the United States Senate has repeatedly passed resolutions recognizing April as Second Chance Month. By 2025, 27 states joined more than 1,100 Churches, Employers, and Community partners in formally recognizing the month and calling attention to the need for meaningful second chances.

Why Second Chances Are a Public Safety Issue

Reentry is often framed as charity or social service, but research and experience show it is a core public safety strategy. Nearly 95% of incarcerated people will eventually return home, with approximately 600,000 people released from state and federal prisons each year, along with millions more from local jails.

The period immediately following release is especially critical. When individuals lack stable housing, health care, employment, or community support, the risk of recidivism increases—not just harming individuals and families, but entire communities.

Organizations like the Crime and Justice Institute (CJI) emphasize that the most effective reentry efforts align multiple systems from day one:

Housing and employment
Behavioral health care
Community supervision
Family and community supports

When these systems work together, beginning before and continuing through the early months after release; public safety improves, costs decrease, and people have a genuine opportunity to rebuild their lives.

A Personal Story Behind the Statistics

While the numbers are compelling, the heart of Second Chance Month lies in individual lives.

In a powerful reflection shared during Second Chance Month, Michelle Cirocco, a nonprofit executive and formerly incarcerated woman, describes the reaction she often receives when she shares her past: surprise. Despite her professional success, people struggle to reconcile her accomplishments with her history of incarceration.

Her message is clear: she is not the exception. She represents what happens when opportunity meets accountability, support, and belief in human potential. Millions of others, she reminds us, are still waiting for that same chance—not to be extraordinary, but simply to be seen as human.

Second Chance Month challenges the damaging assumption that people behind bars are a permanent “other.” Instead, it calls us to recognize what has always been true: People are more than the worst thing they have done.

Faith, Forgiveness, and Restoration

For many faith communities, Second Chance Month is deeply rooted in spiritual principles of Redemption, Mercy, and Reconciliation. Churches across the country observe Second Chance Sunday in April, offering prayer and support for people impacted by crime and incarceration.

Moving From Awareness to Action

As leaders from across Christian traditions have emphasized, there is no theological basis for stripping someone of dignity after they have paid their debt. Restoration of Individuals, Families, and Communities is both a moral calling and a practical necessity.

Second Chance Month is about more than recognition—it is a call to action.

Policymakers are encouraged to:

Sustain funding for evidence-based reentry programs
Promote cross-agency coordination

Practitioners are urged to:

Focus resources on the critical early months after release
Use data-informed, individualized approaches

Funders and partners are called to:

Invest in systemwide solutions, not isolated programs
Support scaling what works

And Communities including employers, churches, and civic leaders can play a transformative role by offering opportunity instead of judgment.

Michigan’s Success Story

In 2018 Michigan governor Rick Snyder declared April 2018 to be Second Chance Month. Since that time Michigan has made progress and is addressing the needs of returning citizens in statistically meaningful and tangible ways. Recidivism rates have been reduced significantly as the Michigan Department of Corrections has increased its focus on Housing and Employment, Behavioral health care, Community supervision, and Family and Community support through its Offender Success Reentry Services program. Offender Success, formerly known as the Michigan Prisoner Re-Entry Initiative, is a public-private partnership that relies on unprecedented collaboration and teamwork between state agencies, human service providers, the faith-based community and private companies who share a vested interest in safer communities and opportunities for all.

Offender Success is a public safety program based on 20 years of research on what works to help returning citizens succeed. By providing needed support, resources and tools, we create safer communities, a better economy and increased quality of life for returning citizens and their families. Offender Success is a hand-up, not a hand-out.

Evidence-Based Programs

Research has shown that evidence-based cognitive programming helps reduce future risk. Programs include Violence Prevention Programming and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. OS Staff develop and monitor these programs, while also ensuring that prisoners are properly placed in these programs based on their parole board jurisdiction date. OS also works with counties throughout the state to provide evidence-based support to probationers through Community Corrections

The Offender Success Administration is housed within the MDOC’s Executive Office and has staff at prisons throughout the state. Staff members include educators, school staff, institutional parole agents, specialists, and analysts who oversee various programs within the prisons and contracted services in the community. The goal of this diverse group of professionals is to foster change and success for those in prison, as well as those on parole or probation.

There are four Major Areas of Focus: Evidence-based Programs, Education, In-Reach, and Community Supports for Parolees.

Education

Michigan is a national leader in correctional education and operates a school at each prison. Schools teach academic (high school equivalency), special education, and career and technical education programs. The MDOC also operates three Vocational Villages, which are the most immersive prison vocational programs in the nation, training students in high-demand trades. The MDOC also partners with a variety of colleges and universities that provide post-secondary classes and degrees to those in prison.

In-Reach

Serving as the bridge between incarceration and the community, In-Reach is utilized by the parole board to provide a more focused opportunity to plan for reentry with the support of dedicated staff.

Community Supports for Parolees

Part of ensuring public safety and personal success is providing necessary supports, such as stable housing, basic supplies, or assistance finding or maintaining a job. The MDOC contracts with 10 regional administrative agencies that provide this assistance and more to eligible parolees throughout the state. Offender Success also oversees a mentoring program for those who are on parole, connecting them with those that have successfully gone through the criminal justice system as a positive peer support.

A Chapter, Not the Whole Book

Second Chance Month reminds us that a past mistake should be a chapter in someone’s story, not the end of it. When we remove unnecessary barriers, align systems, and choose dignity over stigma, we don’t just help individuals succeed. We build safer, stronger, and more compassionate communities for everyone. Let’s commit to seeing the person behind the record and to unlocking second chances that truly last.

Cheapskates

cheapskate The MDOC requires inmates to work while they are incarcerated unless they are medically unable to or in the GED program. As with so many other things the reality is far different from the policy. Inmates do a lot of waiting and that includes on lists to get into school or a job. I wanted to be a tutor as my first choice from day 1 in prison and since there were no Level IV tutors at my facility I had to settle for a job as a Unit Porter cleaning bathrooms and mopping floors. When I got to Level II, I was able to get on the waiting list for a position in the school to open up. In the interim I again worked as a Unit Porter. When I was moved to another facility, I choose to simply go on the waiting list for a tutor job. It took a year for a position to open up. I knew guys who would purposefully choose jobs with long waiting lists simply to avoid working. The Parole Board couldn’t hold it against you if you didn’t work so long as you were on the waiting list. It was all part of the game.

The MDOC is exempt from the minimum wage law for paying inmates. It might be fair to call it slave labor since without inmates working to perform so many functions from food service to facility maintenance, the cost of incarceration would be far more expensive. According to the Policy Directive 05.02.110 prisoners who are assigned to work and/or school shall be paid and/or receive stipends for the assignment. Pay rates for most positions range from approximately $0.74 to $3.34 per day depending on the classification of the job as unskilled or skilled. Students get paid a stipend of $0.54 per day to attend GED classes. With a satisfactory performance score the rate increases to $0.59. This translates into a monthly stipend of approximately $10.50 – $12 a month. With no other source of outside financial support that level of compensation is comparable to those who are indigent.

According to the PD, Unskilled Entry Daily Rates start at $0.74 and rise to $0.84 after 2 months. Semi-skilled rates start at $0.94 and are eligible for a 15% increase if the inmate possess the related certification, such as a porter who has completed the Custodial Maintenance Technology program on their current prefix. In other words, if you earned a CMT certificate the last time you were in prison you won’t be eligible to take the program again and won’t get credit for having taken it previously if assigned a position as a porter on your new bit. In other words, you’re qualified for the job but won’t be compensated for your knowledge because you were dumb enough to come back to prison. This is a major disincentive to working, but obviously not enough of a disincentive to keep a person from coming back to prison in the first place. It seems to me that the rules have been written in a way to exclude the maximum number of inmates from earning the higher pay scales in almost every job classification.

Skilled positions such as Tutor start at $1.24 per day with higher pay rates for having a college degree resulting in a maximum daily rate after two months of $3.34. Or least it used to be this way. In October 2018 the department changed its policy so that only college degrees in the specific field qualified for the higher rate. In other words, only those with a teaching degree who worked as a tutor would get the higher rate. My double major in Chemistry and Biology might no longer afford me the higher rate of compensation and I have no plan on returning to prison to find out.

The PD also has a few exceptions where inmates who have been in certain positions such as Food Service could continue to receive pay and bonuses if they started the work assignment prior to April 2008 when the pay structure was changed to eliminate the bonus. The catch is you must remain in the same assignment at the same facility and earn above average performance reviews. If the inmate is transferred to another facility, they would no longer be eligible for the bonus. The departments work around for this in 2008 was to transfer a significant number of Food Service workers. I came to prison after this happened, but I heard about how unhappy it made the workers to lose a bonus which allowed them to earn over $100 a month in some cases. My Level II bunkie was one of the few lucky ones who was still on the job and earning a bonus. He earned around $90 per month wiping down tables and mopping floors in the chow hall. He actually made more than I did working as a tutor with my college degree.

In February 2019, the clause in the Advanced Education/Training Pay Scale was applied to inmates working as clerk/facilitators for programs such as Sex Offender Programming (SOP). The result was that some of these inmates went from earning $3.34 to $1.77 per day. This is nearly a 50% pay cut. The PD does not provide the rationale behind the decision to reduce pay by specifying such a narrow definition of acceptable college credit as those “in a field of study related to the position.” Anyone that has completed an Associates or Bachelor’s Degree should have more than enough knowledge of basic reading, writing, arithmetic, science and history to work effectively as a GED tutor or serve as a clerk and perform the required tasks and responsibilities at a higher level of competency than those with a GED or high school diploma. I’m not sure how many library majors end up in prison but it’s good to know that they will be compensated at a higher rate for their knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System.

Pay scales for Braille Transcribing and MSI are not included in the PD but from what I remember the inmates working MBTF were paid piecemeal for the projects they work on. Different types of projects required certifications in different areas such as educational transcription, graphics, mathematical or musical notation and several other specific areas. The guys in my unit that worked at MBTF earned over $200 per month and could max out with the maximum annual MDOC allowed compensation. Not only that but many banked projects for when they were to be released from prison so that they could be paid at even higher rates so they could have money for their transition back into society. Not only that they would then be eligible for work as a professional braille transcriber out in the world. I wanted to apply for this program, but it required a minimum of 8 years before your ERD to even apply for the program and take the entrance exam. I believe that there were less than 20 jobs available in MBTF, so they account for less than a tenth of one percent of inmates. Right on the MBTF website they cite the low cost of prison labor as one of the reasons for their success.

MSI factories make everything from clothes to mattresses to printed forms and eyeglasses. There were factories making many various products at 10 prisons located all over the state. There was a factory at my first prison and those inmates could earn up to $200 per month. If there were large orders, there was also overtime on the weekends in order to complete them on time. The number of inmates employed by MSI is small, but I don’t know the number but it’s probably less than 2,000. MSI sells its products to jails and prisons across the country in addition to the MDOC facilities and the low labor cost is no doubt a competitive advantage over commercial companies they are in the market with.

All of this begs the question: Why when the cost of living always goes up is the MDOC reducing compensation for inmate labor? Commissary prices go up and many inmates can’t even afford basic hygiene items on what they are paid. Many don’t have outside support or owe so much in restitution, court costs, and fines that the department takes most of what their people put into their accounts. For some even their prison earnings are garnished if they have more than $50 in their account, so it doesn’t even pay to work. For the rest prison pay doesn’t buy much. The maximum amount that can be spent in the commissary is $100 every two weeks, which doesn’t mean anything if all you have is $12 to show for a month’s stipend as a student.

In some other states’ inmates are employed by private corporations and paid a living wage. A portion of their earnings are placed into a trust account to help them after they’re paroled. Another portion goes to paying down restitution, court costs, and fines. The rest is available to the inmate to spend. Prison is a pretty miserable place and being able to purchase a few items beyond the basic necessities goes a long way towards a positive mindset. And a positive mindset goes a long way toward rehabilitation. Low wages encourage theft since they have nothing to lose. Low wages mean hardship and deprivation that wear down the body and the mind which can lead to long term mental, emotional and physical problems that will last long after they are released.

Wages paid to inmates should not be a way for the department to make budget. That would literally be “penny wise and Pound foolish.” Cost of living is a factor in determining pay for everyone else, why shouldn’t it apply to inmates. If you want to send a message and “correct” inmates, then teach them the value of honest work. Nothing speaks to a person’s self worth more than compensation that respects the individual’s service. I don’t mean that inmates should be paid the state’s prevailing minimum wage but maybe bring in more factory jobs that pay like MSI and follow the model used by other states that allow inmates to save for the future. For in-house positions acknowledge the value of higher education, training, and experience to create a new pay scale that more adequately compensates inmates for the necessary functions that they perform. Being a miser and a cheapskate is not the way to rehabilitate human beings.

Butt Naked Fish

This is a reasonable representation of what Butt Naked Fish looks like in comparison to a regular breaded fillet.

Not much needs more to be said about food service in the MDOC than to mention “Butt Naked Fish.” This will elicit a visceral response from anyone who has served appreciable time as a prisoner. BFN is an unbreaded fish fillet that has more in common with particle board than Van de Kamp’s. Most prisoners would describe it as a square white hockey puck made from fins and scales. It wasn’t seasoned yet the flavor is indescribable. Generally, it was served on the Diet Line for people with a medically restricted diet like diabetics however, from time to time it would make an appearance on the menu for the regular food service when there was a shortage of the breaded baked fish normally served.

I heard stories from the old timers about getting giant cinnamon rolls and coffee for breakfast. Pork chops, fried chicken, beef liver and other real protein sources were served as a regular part of the menu. At one time the MDOC had its own dairy, slaughter house, and farms that provided the majority of the food stocks for the chow hall. Prison work camps supplied the labor. Then a series of unfortunate events involving prisoners resulted in the closing of the work camps and the elimination of the prison farms back in the early 1980s. This corresponded closely in time with the “tough on crime” movement that more than doubled the number of people behind bars and put a significant strain on the department’s budget. Food service was severely impacted, and the goal was put in place to feed inmates for $1 per day.

There have been a number of changes in food service in the last few years as the department sought to reduce costs further under Governor Snyder. Food service was outsourced to Aramark a national vender that provides meals to a number of state prison systems, in the attempt to reduce cost by leveraging increased buying power. When the contract was put out for bid none of the original bids met the targeted cost savings. On rebid Aramark was awarded the contract. In what I would describe as a rocky relationship, Aramark replaced union food stewards with minimum wage inexperienced personal. The officer’s union lost something like 350 staff positions and was bitter and resentful about that and went out of its way to ensure that privatization of the food service failed. They didn’t care about the impact it would have on the 40,000+ inmates.

After several years of struggling to hire and retain sufficient staffing to provide oversight of the inmates working in the kitchen, contraband smuggling, illicit sexual relationships between staff and inmates, and fines for failing to meet contract obligations, Aramark decided to give back the contract. Trinity was then given the contract at several million dollars above what Aramark had been paid. Trinity basically took the Aramark employees and the problems continued the same as before. Articles appeared in newspapers across the state detailing issues involving the food service and calls by many to return it to department control. In 2017 it was announced that Trinity would be leaving, the food service returned to the department, and jobs returned to the union.

What is lost in all this is the effect it had on the inmates. Food quality and quantity decreased meaning that there were many times when inmates went hungry and not by choice. Hungry natives are restless natives. Back in the day it was understood that one of the ways to keep the prison population under control was to make sure that they got fed. Today though prison is all stick and no carrot. In the roughly 30 years that the department tried to limit the food cost to $1 per day for each inmate, food and labor costs have increased significantly. The only choice was to buy cheaper meal alternatives and reduce portion sizes. For instance, instead of fried chicken breasts baked leg quarters were served and over time they shrank in size. I once observed that on days when chicken was being served that there were fewer pigeons to be seen on the yard. Ground meats like hamburgers or meatballs that looked and tasted like there was more filler than beef or turkey caused many inmates to ask, “Where’s the beef?” like the old lady in the Wendy’s commercial. The Hot dogs and Polish sausage had the consistence and taste of a rubber hose.

Pizza was served by the single slice that were the size of a 3×5 index card. For a guy that used to eat a whole medium and sometimes a large pizza all by himself, this just didn’t satisfy me at all. One time the pizza would be so over cooked that it was as stiff as cardboard with burnt cheese on it, and the next time the dough would still be raw in the center of the pan. This sometimes occurred in the same meal service, it was just luck of the draw if you got an eatable piece.

Calories from other sources such as potatoes, which are a starchy carbohydrate, make up a sizable portion of the meal. Mashed potatoes, Garlic mashed potatoes, Oven browned potatoes, Cheesy potatoes, Potato salad, Baked potatoes, Tater tots, and Potato wedges. Potatoes were served on average four days a week and sometimes for both lunch and dinner. I heard that at one facility the food service director owned a potato farm and sold his crop to the MDOC at his facility. There were an unusual number of food substitutions where potatoes replaced the scheduled rice or pasta, go figure. Now I like potatoes, but when they are cooked in such a way that they are uneatable, they provide no nutritional value and simply end up in the trash.

Boiled collard greens, spinach, and cabbage; canned green beans, mixed vegetables, and corn; cooked beets (not the pickled ones); and carrots that looked like they came from a deer hunters bait pile, were cooked until they are flavorless and devoid of nutritional value. When a menu change introduced peas to the rotation a friend of mine exclaimed, “I thought these had gone extinct!”

In recent years meals like Turkey ala King and Turkey Tetrazzini were added alongside old staples like Chili Mac as ways to stretch the budget further. Why is it that on every menu there is always one meal that doesn’t look good on paper let alone in reality? Back in the day it might have been Chipped Beef on Toast, which was affectionately called “S#*t on a Shingle” or a modern dish like Turkey Teriyaki (Turkey Teri-yuk-e) or Salisbury Patty (Salisbury’s Mistake). There were those who didn’t, wouldn’t or couldn’t eat the main dish with the beef, chicken or turkey included, so at lunch and dinner there would be a meatless alternative offered. It would sometimes be the same dish with soy substituted for the meat, at other times it was beans. Occasionally the alternative was better than the primary offering like when they served Spinach Au Gratin. But like everything else in the chow hall it depended on who cooked it, so some days it was a lose-lose situation with no clearly better choice.

The best part of the meal was the 2 slices of wheat bread and the desert. The bread was store bought, so it was hard for them to ruin it. I would take it back to my bunk to make a peanut butter sandwich. Desert was either a cookie or a piece of sheet cake. They used to serve ice cream before Aramark took over. At one facility we used to get ice cream donated by a local dairy company when they had a manufacturing hiccup and mixed in the wrong type of nuts or something. In fact, a number of Michigan food manufacturers donated or sold off-spec but still eatable food products at significantly reduced prices to the MDOC. The practice of accepting these ended when Aramark took over.

Breakfast was a rotation of oatmeal, grits, or Ralston (Cream of What?) or All Bran as a cold cereal alternative. Older menus offered waffles and sausages once a week. Newer menus mixed in coffee cake, gravy and biscuit or French toast bake (the French don’t take credit for this). Most inmates didn’t even bother getting up for breakfast. Generally, food service started too early and offered little incentive to go, unless they were serving peanut butter, which we would bring back to save for that peanut butter sandwich later. Eggs, even powdered eggs were not served at all during my time in prison. I had a diabetic roommate one time that got hardboiled eggs in his snack bag. He didn’t like them and would trade them to me for what ever I had in my locker that he could eat when his blood sugar got too low.

Coffee wasn’t part of the meal service like it was back in the day. The options were milk or a juice like apple or orange for breakfast, and for lunch and dinner a Kool-Aid like drink, or water. The serving size was listed as 1 cup, but the plastic cups were small, and I don’t think could hold 8 ounces without spilling.

If you look at the published menu included below you will see that it looks a lot like a public-school lunch menu. The menu had a 6-week cycle where the lunch and dinner meals were switched, so the reality was 3 weeks of menu variety. While it looks good on paper, I can assure you that the paper tastes better. As I have described elsewhere theft was a major problem, especially after it was turned over to Aramark and Trinity. This had a significant impact on the meal preparation. For instance, when a recipe called for spices, the required amounts would be issued to the inmate cook. If he decided to steal the spices and sell them on the yard, then the dish he prepared would be bland. Likewise, the Kool-Aid drink mix came in powdered form and if the person preparing it decided to take some of it then the drink would taste watery. Many guys would take the seasoning packs from Raman Noodles that they would purchase in the commissary to season the meals in the chow hall. I did that on a regular basis, but I also noticed that the food served in the chow hall was like a flavor blackhole. No matter how much seasonings or hot sauce I put on some dishes it didn’t seem to make a difference.

On several special occasions when volunteers from a faith-based organization came into the prison and shared a meal with us in the chow hall, I got to observe first-hand the reactions of people who had never tasted prison food before. The experienced volunteers who knew better than to eat the meal would stick to the fruit, but there was always one rookie who would try the meal. Without fail we would hear the next day that the brave volunteer who tried the food ended up sick overnight. To say that prison food is an acquired taste would be an understatement. Conversely, I heard from more than one guy who had returned to prison that there would be a period of adjustment when I went home as my body got used to real food again. The only good thing that I can say about prison food is that it is better than what they serve in the county jails.

Sabotage

self sabotage

A guy with a parole in his pocket gets caught with spud juice. (Happens more often than you would think.) His “friends” tried to talk him into closing his brewery, but he told them that he needed to stack up coffee bags since he was going to Detroit Reentry Center (DRC) for a residential substance abuse program and he needed to be able to buy heroin while he was there. His friend’s comment was I guess he didn’t really want to go home.

Guys on parole are sent back to prison for violating the terms of their parole because of drinking or drugs all the time. Equally as often it is something else like staying out after curfew, missing work or meetings with their PO or having police contact because they got into a fight or were out joy-riding. This happened to a guy I know, and the observation of another parolee was “I guess he didn’t serve enough time.”

Whether in prison or on parole some guys have their eyes on the wrong prize. Instead of focusing on gaining and keeping their freedom they are seeking other things. You’d thing they would know better than to play with fire, but it’s obvious that they didn’t learn their lesson from being burned the first time. For some it takes a long time to figure out what is truly important. There is statistical proof that people age out of crime. People in their forties and fifties are significantly less likely to commit crimes than people in their teens and twenties. Prison has a revolving door for those who continue to commit minor felonies and receive sentences from 2-5 years in length. Three strike laws were enacted to address these habitual offenders by increasing the length of their sentences in the hope that they would learn their lesson.

According to recidivism rates those who committed major crimes such as murder or rape and served long sentences are less likely to reoffend and return to prison than those who committed crimes like domestic abuse or selling small quantities of drugs who received shorter sentences. You never hear of someone who spent two 10 to 20-year sentences in prison going back with a third sentence which is basically a life sentence. So, it is true that with age comes wisdom. Even the most stubborn, hard-headed, strong-willed outlaw learns that if they stay in the game too long there are only two options, either be carried out in a pine box or hauled off in handcuffs. The older they get the better retirement looks.

For those in prison eagerly looking forward to their parole there is another form of sabotage that happens. Sometimes other people in prison, who may have years to go before they will even be considered for parole or have already been denied parole will try to get someone else’s parole revoked. You might say that misery loves company. There are those in prison who would go out of their way to do this for any number of reasons. They could be bored, racist, malicious, vindictive, or simply sadistic by getting pleasure from causing pain to another person. For this very reason I know a guy who didn’t tell anyone in prison that he got his parole, let alone his parole date. The morning he paroled, he got up early, dressed in his street clothes, packed his stuff, and went to the officer’s station. He didn’t say a word to anyone.

In prison kite writing is a way of life for some. Kites are notes written to the administration. There is a mailbox in every housing unit, and it is easy to write the warden or unit counselor. Most do this by signing someone else’s name in order to remain anonymous. They make allegations about another individual which may or may not be true, but sufficiently provocative to draw the reaction of staff. This is known as “dry snitching.” It is a passive aggressive tactic that works well enough that it’s not going away any time soon. Claim that someone is threating you, that so-n-so is doing such-n-such, or that your bunkie has a cellphone, shank, drugs, or other serious contraband, then sit back and wait for the show to start. Nothing can ruin your day like being called off the yard to see the Inspector to answer questions about an allegation that you sexually assaulted another inmate.

Getting a Class I Misconduct after receiving your parole and prior to release will result in the loss of your parole and earn you a 12 to 24-month flop. It might even raise your security level or get you rode off the compound. At the very least you will have your property tossed like a fruit salad, be forced to prove your innocence, and lose sleep trying to figure out who wrote the kite. In a place where you are guilty until proven innocent the threat is real, and you need to constantly watch your back.

I had a cubemate that started stealing from me the last month prior to my parole. I had started to sell off my possessions that I wasn’t going to take home. Prison is not like death, you can take your personal property with you, but why would you? I would come back to the cube after work and find something small missing like my earbuds. We both knew that I wouldn’t do anything about it and risk my parole, so every couple of days something else would turn up missing. Then this guy who didn’t have anything was able to get a black market TV. I’m sure my other cubemates knew what was going on, but nobody said anything. On the morning I left prison I slipped under his bed and used my padlock to secure the TV’s power cord to the bed. This would force him to cut the cord in order to move the TV. There were a number of sweeps through the housing unit at that time looking for TV’s that weren’t on the inmate’s property card and securing the TV to his bunk would make it impossible for him to hide it. I hope that there is a special place in hell for prison thieves.

Of course, it is those that sabotage themselves like in my opening example that is the primary problem. Prison isn’t about rehabilitation. Programs like the Phase I and Phase II substance abuse classes that are required for those whose crime involved alcohol or drugs or for individuals who have a history of substance abuse, but from what I’ve seem most people treat the class like a joke. For more serious cases there are residential treatment programs where more in-depth programming and counseling is available. With the demand for bed space in these programs there tends to be a mentality on the part of those running these programs to simply push the inmates through so that many of the participants come out unchanged. Change doesn’t happen unless the individual wants to and for many going to prison wasn’t hitting rock-bottom yet. Intellectual arguments, reciting facts and figures, or telling horror stories about others isn’t enough to persuade many who are happy in their addictions to want to change. They have learned to say the right things to convince the powers that be that they have changed. They get their long-awaited paroles but can’t fly straight long enough to get out or complete their parole. In the end the only person they have fooled is themselves.

Educated Guess

Time well spent or wasted

I worked as a tutor in the GED program for nearly 5 years, under three different teachers at two different prisons. There isn’t much that was more rewarding than when one of my students would point me out to his family in the visiting room and say, “That man is helping me get my GED.” And there wasn’t much that was more frustrating than seeing a student who could get his GED fail to apply himself and leave prison with nothing to show for his time. Unfortunately, the later occurs far more frequently than the former. A significant percentage of the inmates in prison failed to graduate from high school and most tuned out long before they dropped out. They put no value on gaining a formal education, the streets were their school. Many are functionally illiterate, barely able to write their own name or complete simple arithmetic calculations.

While a few of these men may truly have a learning disability, more however have damaged themselves through drug abuse. Some of my students had received Social Security Disability payments before the came to prison because at some point in time they had been diagnosed with a learning disability when they were in school out in the world. Now they refuse to make any attempt at completing their GED because they would lose their SSD and have to go to work. As adults they are clearly intelligent enough but lack the motivation.

Conditions such as ADHD go untreated in prison and these students are disruptive to those around them in the classroom. Unable to focus they are constantly engaging others in conversation, sometimes even from across the room. They don’t have an indoor voice or even the awareness of how loud they are. More interested in what is going on around them than the assignments they are supposed to be working on, they are like bees buzzing around whatever attracts their attention for a moment before moving on to the next thing. It only frustrates the teacher, the tutors, and the other students who are trying to learn to have them in the classroom. However, only under extraordinary circumstances will these students receive an exemption from the requirement to attend school. It is more likely that the teacher will write a ticket regarding their disruptive behavior and eventually expel them from the classroom. This will almost guarantee that the parole board will flop them. They will be put back on the waiting list to attend school, be assigned to another classroom where they once again be disruptive and repeat the cycle of expulsion and flop again.

There are critical shortages of text books and other teaching materials. The result is that in most prisons the books must stay in the classroom making it difficult for students who do try to apply themselves to do homework and complete their GED quickly. Textbooks are generally in poor condition. One of my tasks was to periodically clean textbooks of graffiti and answers that had been penciled in. I also made repairs to damaged covers and bindings in order to keep the textbooks in circulation for as long as possible. Even after the new GED standard came out the decision was made to continue to use the old textbooks even though they did not contain the new concepts added to the curriculum. The question formats and language changed significantly with the new standard and the result was that students taking the new test were not adequately prepared.

kentucky prison GED grad rates — I found this graph of graduation rates published by the Kentucky DOC which reflects the decrease in graduation rates that resulted from the implementation of the new GED requirements. I could not find a similar graphic for Michigan but I suspect the results to be similiar.

To address the issues of test preparation for the new computerized testing format the MDOC did invest a significant amount of money into new computers and servers capable of running educational software. After several false starts additional resources were allocated to fix the problems, and new programs were just beginning to be introduced around the time I left prison. I don’t know for certain whether this made any improvement in graduation rates, but I suspect not. We only had four computers in a classroom with an average of 18-20 students so relatively few had any significant opportunities to practice. For some that had never used a computer this could actually influence how well they performed on the test.

At the prisons where I was a tutor the classes each ran one hour and thirty minutes a day, Monday through Friday. There were four periods, two before lunch and two afterwards. When I was at a multi-level facility the level IV students were able to mix with those from Level II or I in school. This and in medical were the only places that inmates of the higher security level were able to. The rest of the time whether in the gym, library, or yard separation was strictly maintained. At level IV-only facilities I would have been able to serve as a tutor however, in the multi-level facility I had to wait until my security level was down-graded to Level II.

The qualifications for being a tutor were that you had to have attained at least a GED and achieved a grade level of at least 11.5 on a standardized test of Reading, Math, and Language skills administered to potential tutor candidates. Most of the tutors that I knew held college degrees. At one facility where I was, a certain well-known, disgraced former mayor of a major Michigan city was working as a tutor. There were usually 3-4 tutors in a classroom. The pay for tutors was one of the highest paying jobs for inmates. With a college degree I made around $3.60 per day for 6 hours of work. Duties and responsibilities varied depending on the teacher. At times I had students waiting in line for help or we worked in small groups. At other times I read all the books, newspapers, and magazines I could get my hands on to keep from being bored.

Some teachers tried to maintain a classroom environment that would be conducive to learning with library-like silence where students worked independently on assignments. It was in these classrooms that the disruptive students tended to be the biggest problem. Other teachers ran their classes more like a daycare were students engaged in non-academic discussions and little if any learning occurred on a daily basis. While I’m sure the statistics such as graduation rates or student progress on the quarterly standardized tests could be generated on an individual teacher basis, to the best of my knowledge teacher performance in terms of academic success is not a factor in their job performance evaluations.

Principles and school psychologists are generally overseeing schools at several facilities. This meant that the principle was generally in the school office at each facility one day a week. There was a school secretary and they generally over saw an inmate clerk to manage the day-to-day activities. Inmates seeking to contact the principle unfortunately rarely got a response to kites submitted for a range of inquires from requesting a change of classroom into one that was more conducive to learning to requests to get into or out of school for whatever reason. The psychologist was the one that could make an evaluation of whether a student was sufficiently impaired to qualify for an exemption do a true learning disability or whether students with learning disabilities qualified for more time or helps while taking exams. The criteria they used was clearly different from the criteria used by schools out in the world because so many students had been previously diagnosed with a learning disability but were neither exempt from school or given extra time or helps on exams.

The school secretary and clerks were vitally important. They maintained records on every inmate on the compound. When inmates were transferred to another facility their school records also had to be transferred. The Classification office would need to verify inmate records like whether they had a GED, high school diploma, or college degree to determine whether inmates met the qualifications for positions like tutors or clerks, and the pay grade associated with each level of education attained. By records I am of course referring to paper files. The MDOC is archaic in its systems. I once had to fill out a paper form to request a college transcript to confirm my college education. This form was then faxed to a phone number that was looked up in a large book listing the contact information of every school and university in the state. It took three tries to get my transcript and it only happened because the teacher I was tutoring for was a fellow alumnus, who took it upon himself to follow-up on the request with the university. An original certified copy of the transcript submitted by my family was unacceptable because it had not come directly from the school or university to the principle’s attention at the school office. Since the certified copy of my college transcript had been accepted by the MDOC when compiling information for the Pre-Sentence Investigation report and placed in my permanent record this really made no sense.

While the classroom was supposed to be maintained as an environment where students could study, the same could not be said for the housing units. The typical Level I housing unit is crowded, noisy and dark. In the typical cubical setting what started out as one bed, locker, and desk per inmate in a four-man cubical has been changed to eight men. To make room for the extra bunk beds some of the desks were removed leaving little space for someone to study even if it wasn’t noisy and dark. In Level II the two-man cells provided each inmate with a desk and light. By closing the door, you could get some quiet in order to study. The problem being that in the higher security levels inmates were there for only one of two reasons, either they were serving long sentences with many years until their ERD or they were unmanageable in the lower levels. In either case they were more likely to be at the bottom of the waiting list to get into school. The number or inmates waiting to get into the GED program is greater than the number of students enrolled. The waiting list is based on prioritizing those who are closest to their ERD.

Once an inmate is in school, he will remain there until he completes his GED, paroles or is kicked out due to behavioral problems. I have known students who were fortunate to get into the GED program with many years to go before their ERD. They got into school because the facility had a short waiting list at some point. Once in the program they remained there because they couldn’t or wouldn’t put in the effort to study and pass the GED exams. There is no time limit in which to complete the program except for parole. I have known men who spent over ten years in school without making any progress towards or completing any of the GED test subjects. Students take quarterly standardized tests to measure their progress or the lack of progress. The teachers are supposed to write regular progress reports and generate educational plans for each student to monitor their progress and set goals to help them achieve. Unfortunately, like so many other things in the MDOC it isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. The students most motivated and capable of earning their GED will do so in six months to a year. The rest will be stuck in a form of purgatory, either hoping to win the lottery and pass the GED exams by luck or they are simply waiting out their time until they parole.

Students in the GED or Vocational education programs are paid $0.56 per school day to attend class. Students aren’t eligible to hold other jobs except in cases of institutional need, which I never saw. On average a student makes $12 a month. Just enough to keep them above indigent status, but unable to afford even the basic necessary hygiene items in the commissary. If a student gets expelled from school, he is not eligible to work. So, unless the student has some form of family support he must survive by hustling, theft or simply try to survive on nothing but chow hall food and state soap.

Some men that were required to attend school had worked for many years without an education maintaining steady employment or even a career prior to incarceration. I have also known older men who were over the age of 65 that would be eligible to Social Security retirement benefits out in the world that were forced to attend class. Policy clearly stated that both of these circumstances made the men eligible for exemption, but as with so many other situations in the MDOC policy and procedure were not the same.

The prison GED classes are not like traditional primary or secondary school classes. There is a mishmash of individuals at different places in their educational journey randomly placed into classrooms. Teachers don’t actually teach but rather take attendance, process paperwork, and try to keep the peace while trying not to be stolen blind. The GED program is a learn at your own pace, self-taught program where teachers and tutors work with students to develop a course of study, however it is solely up to the student whether or not they will do any work. The tutors are available to help one-on-one for those who would avail themselves of the service. Many students choose to attempt to go it alone and never seek assistance even though they have only elementary school grade levels in reading and math skills and are completely unable to be self-taught. I think that in some cases it was pride. Men who wouldn’t ask for help because they thought of themselves as “grown assed men” and not kids who could take care of themselves preferring to fail on their own than ask for help from anyone.

Only a small percentage of the students who come into the classroom with an early elementary grade level education will complete the GED. Most students who complete the GED already score in the Middle/High school level on standardized TABE (Test of Adult Basic Education) tests which are administered quarterly to all students in school. These students may only be in school for 1-2 years and graduate. The result is a very limited turnover rate and the accumulation of poor students clogging up the limited number of available slots in the GED program.

Just as a school must maintain a proper learning environment to encourage students to excel the MDOC needs to create a proper learning environment if they expect to have success with its educational program. This goes beyond the school environment, if the home environment does not support and encourage education then no amount of school effort will be sufficient. Likewise unless the MDOC addresses the environment in the housing units, no amount of programming effort will succeed. Desks, lighting, noise, access to educational resources, distraction from non-students all are issues in the housing units. At some facilities the MDOC has begun a program of placing vocational education students into designated housing units. The intent is to create a better living environment that will compliment the learning environment. The same should be done for ABE/GED students because they need to study outside of the classroom to be successful. One and a half hours a day in class is not enough time dedicated to academics. They need mandatory study halls equal to class time or at the least a housing unit environment in which they can study. Classes need to be taught, not self-taught for Adult Basic Education (ABE) students with reading levels below the 6^th grade. Separate ABE and GED into separate classrooms. Place more emphasis on reading. Inmates can’t get anything out of the parole board mandated programing if they can’t read and write. Do not disrupt class time with other call-outs to medical or other programs by blocking out times in the morning/afternoon for class/study.

While this may sound harsh coming from a former inmate, I believe the MDOC must stop playing games when it comes to inmate compliance with programming requirements. Good faith effort must be demonstrated by inmates in required programming to achieve parole. Flop a few guys for trying to skate on their education and more of them will get the message. Anyone who resists cooperating with required programming is not fit to be released back into society. While having a zero-tolerance policy for slackers, this must be balanced with the MDOC doing a better job of identifying the truly learning disabled and providing resources for their required programs.

(Update to this post on April 25, 2019)

The 2019 National Teacher of the Year was awarded to a Social Studies teacher who works at a juvenile detention center in Virginia. He has been studying the school to prison pipeline problem for several years and has published a number of articles and educational curriculum through Yale University. Among his discoveries he found that empathy not sympathy was an effective way to reach his students. He encouraged the other teachers and corrections staff to help him create a positive learning environment. He utilizes materials that include curriculum on race, culture and punishment to help his students understand the system and circumstances that led to their incarceration, and better understand how to avoid future incarceration. For the next year he will be traveling the country advocating for students and teachers and is looking forward to share the story of his students. The MDOC needs thinking outside of the box like this to address the deficiencies in its educational programming.

The national template: Deny, Delay, Deflect

Michigan’s mold crisis: the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility

How the coverup works

Contaminated drinking water: Michigan’s other prison health scandal

Flint, Genesee County Jail, and the carceral version of environmental abandonment

What accountability would actually require

Endnotes

Share this:

How Michigan’s GPS Tether Program Developed

How The Technology Works

Why Place Matters in GPS Monitoring

The Claimed Benefits and the Real Drawbacks

What It Costs and Who Profits

How Michigan Compares with Other State and Federal Tether Programs

State and Federal Regulatory and Judicial Activity

Does It Make Anyone Safer? And Does Lifetime Tether Cause More Harm Than Good?

References

Share this:

What Segregation Means in the MDOC

Why MDOC Uses Segregation

What the Outcomes Show

Segregation and Human Rights

Should Michigan Discontinue Segregation?

What Reform Should Look Like

References

Share this:

What a Prison Lockdown Actually Means

Mental Health: Why Lockdowns Hurt So Much

Rehabilitation: Lockdowns Don’t Just Pause Programs—They Break Them

Are Lockdowns Increasing? What U.S. Data Shows—and What It Doesn’t

1) The COVID-19 Shock: Lockdown as Public-Health Control

2) The Staffing Squeeze: Lockdown as a Substitute for Adequate Operations

3) Security Threats: Contraband, Drugs, Phones, and Violence

Underlying Causes: Why Lockdowns Keep Spreading

What Can Be Done: A Humane, Evidence-Based Path Out of the Lockdown Spiral

Conclusion: Safety Without Humanity Isn’t Safety

Endnotes

Share this:

Delaying the Question Does Not Change the Outcome

Broad Background-Check Screens Still Exclude Qualified People

Ban the Box Can Shift Discrimination Instead of Reducing It

The Background-Check System Itself Is Error-Prone and Hard to Challenge

“Civil” Punishment Can Last Forever, Making Employment Exclusion Permanent

What Real Fair-Chance Hiring Requires

Conclusion

Notes

Share this:

A Movement Rooted in Dignity and Opportunity

Why Second Chances Are a Public Safety Issue

A Personal Story Behind the Statistics

Faith, Forgiveness, and Restoration

Moving From Awareness to Action

Michigan’s Success Story

A Chapter, Not the Whole Book

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: