Lansing, MI – According to the press release, this will give people who commit minor offenses an opportunity to avoid jail.
The bipartisan package of criminal justice reform bills are based on recommendations by the Michigan Joint Task Force on jail and pretrial incarcerations. The task force took a deep dive by conducting a year-long study of jails and receiving public input on how to find alternatives to jail for certain misdemeanors.
“Over the last two years, we’ve worked with leaders on both sides of the aisle to make Michigan a national leader on criminal justice reform,” Whitmer said in a statement.
Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, co-led the task force, said:
“For the last generation, we’ve seen our jail population skyrocket while crime go down over last 30 years. People who were locked up for license suspensions when the licenses were taken away for things that had nothing to do with how they drove. These packages of bills that the governor signed into law today are really first steps toward reforming that system and ending that vicious cycle.”
Among the new laws, drivers who had their licenses suspended for violations — not related to dangerous driving — will no longer end up behind bars. Gilchrist added that the new set of bills is a game changer.
Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist said:
“To stop people from going to jail in the first place and to be able to give people a chance to automatically clear their records like no other state has is really quite extraordinary and it speaks to the power of the commitment of getting things done for people — the power of having a real bipartisan consensus that we can work on.”
The cost of putting people behind bars also influenced the task force’s findings.
