For years, Carol Jacobsen has told me about women locked up in Michigan prisons who either never should have been imprisoned, or whose sentences were far too harsh.
These have included women who were battered repeatedly by boyfriends or husbands, who were forced or brainwashed into becoming accomplices or merely being present at a murder or other crime, and then got the same harsh sentence as the killer himself.
Some actually were convicted of murder for turning on their tormentors, or killing them in an effort to save themselves or their children. It is difficult, reading the transcripts of some of these cases, to understand where the judges and the jurors were coming from.
In recent years, sentencing has been a little more rational, and judges and juries have tended to be more rational about assessing motive, and guilt.
But we are still wasting too much money locking up people who don’t need to be kept behind bars for our safety, or theirs. We don’t seem to know whether our prisons should rehabilitate or punish, so we have prisons for men and women that don’t do either.
What they have too often done instead is function as sort of a graduate school for career criminals and a training ground for psychopaths, one that costs Michigan taxpayers about $2 billion a year.
And while these prisons certainly aren’t cheap, neither are they plush. Carol Jacobsen, who hasn’t been known for outrageous charges in the past, has written a letter claiming of horrendous conditions at the Huron Valley Corrections facility. Corrections spokesman Chris Gautz, who has always been straight with me in the past, vehemently denies her claims.
He says there is no overcrowding or black mold, no worms in the housing units, and says that prisoners with mental illness are not placed in segregation, as she charges. He also has invited me to see the prison for myself, which I haven’t yet had time to do.
Jacobsen’s charges are indeed sensational. But if any of them are true, it is a black mark against our corrections system, which I believe has made considerable progress in improving conditions in recent years. It is significant that Heidi Washington, the director of the Michigan Department of Corrections, is the one top official from the Snyder Administration to be retained by Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Even so, and even though the overall number of people in state prisons has declined by more than 12,000, I believe is that there are too many people locked up in Michigan, and that we would all be well served by more efforts to rehabilitate those who are in prison, and help what are now called “returning citizens” reenter society in a productive way.
The Michigan Department of Corrections has made considerable progress in reducing the recidivism rate, and that’s something we should all applaud. We should also support the efforts of groups like Samaritas, which are helping women who have been jailed, who have been the victims of sex trafficking get their shattered lives together and function in society.
There are still groups and individuals like this who are quietly doing considerable good work, and are not, in this flamboyant and mouthy age, sufficiently recognized for what they do.
We should make more of an effort to appreciate them, recognize them, and show support for what they do.
