Prison wire

Prison reform is quickly becoming a hot topic in Michigan.

(File photo)

LANSING -- Ten thousand fewer prisoners and $250 million more in the state's coffers.

If state lawmakers were to follow the recommendations laid out by Citizens Alliance on Prisons and Public Spending, or CAPPS, those two numbers could become a reality within the next five years, according to a report released Thursday.

The report comes weeks after Gov. Rick Snyder laid out some of his plans for criminal justice reform. Barbara Levine, associate director for research and policy at CAPPS, said their report dovetails with Snyder's call for reform.

"This report provides a roadmap that is consistent with Gov. Snyder's call for 'smart justice,' and can be an important tool for policymakers as they reconsider criminal justice policies that are both ineffective, and too costly in both fiscal and human terms," she said in a statement.

According to the report, there are 43,704 people in prison in Michigan right now. The state spends about $2 billion a year on the Michigan Department of Corrections' budget.

The amount of people in Michigan's prisons is down from the peak in 2006, when there were more than 51,000 people in Michigan's prisons. However, since the early 1970s, the prison population grew about 450 percent despite a reduction in crime and a 9.2 percent increase in population.

The CAPPS report, 10,000 Fewer Prisoners: Strategies To Reach The Goal, gives two dozen policy changes that could drop Michigan's prison population.

The recommendations follow four main themes: Reduce the number of people who are entering the state's prisons, reduce minimum sentence lengths, increase paroles and establish earned sentencing credits, commonly called "good time."

The report calls for the establishment of presumptive parole, which would grant supervised release to prisoners when they reach their minimum sentence.

The recommendations include increasing community-based sanctions for the approximately 6,000 people who go into prison every year with sentences of two years or less; reducing the amount of probation and parole violators who enter prison and changing the age of criminal responsibility to 18 and requiring judicial review for all juvenile waivers.

Combined, these recommendations would eliminate more than 3,300 beds in Michigan prisons, according to the report.

The report also calls for the narrowing of sentencing guidelines ranges, the manual for the state's judges to sentence convicts for a variety of crimes; starting sentencing guidelines ranges as a slightly lower number of months; slightly change the scoring of offense and prior record variables to result in lower ranges and revise how habitual offenders are treated.

The changes to habitual offenders -- Michigan's version of the law commonly referred to as "three strikes" -- would not count prior convictions in multiple ways and change habitual to mean multiple unrelated convictions instead of multiple convictions from a single incident.

The various reforms to the minimum sentence lengths could eliminate 2,121 beds in Michigan's prisons, according to the report.

CAPPS also calls for the establishment of presumptive parole. Presumptive parole would mean inmates would be released from prison on parole when they reach their earliest release date, ", unless there is objective and verifiable evidence that the prisoner would present a high current risk to public safety if released," the report states.

If prisoners with a high or average likelihood of success on parole were released upon serving their minimum sentence, approximately 3,978 beds would be eliminated. If only the prisoners with a high probability of success were put on parole, 2,710 beds would be eliminated, the report states.

Other recommended reforms include expediting and reviewing the cases of 850 parolable lifers; create parole eligibility for juveniles sentenced to long prison terms after 15 years or half of their minimum sentence; allow more medical paroles; reducing the average length of stay in prison for parole violators by four months and parole more prisoners nine months before their release for their maximum sentence.

The report also calls for re-establishing earned sentencing credits, which were eliminated by a ballot initiative in 1978. Allowing "good time," or time off a sentence for good behavior, could eliminate about 1,255 beds eliminated in Michigan prisons.

"We now have the benefit of decades of experience and a wealth of research that tells us which policies are effective and which ones are simply a burden to taxpayers," Levine said. "Just as we adopted strategies that seemed appropriate in the 1980s and 1990s, we can respond to the changes of the last 35 years and adopt new strategies in 2015."

Officials from Snyder's office and the Michigan Department of Corrections said they had not seen the report Wednesday and could not comment on its content.

•Read the full report.

Kyle Feldscher is the Capitol education and MSU reporter for MLive Media Group. Reach him via email at kylefeldscher@mlive.com or follow him on Twitter at @Kyle_Feldscher. Read more stories here.