Suggestions are being heard in Lansing on how to reduce jail populations. The 21-member Jail and Pretrial Incarceration Task Force was created by Governor Gretchen Whitmer and has support from Republican legislative leaders, like Speaker of the House Lee Chatfield. He spoke to Michigan News Network this week about the work the task force is doing.
“If we’re real honest with ourselves and look at ourselves in a mirror, we’ll see that wee are an outlier here in the state of Michigan when it comes to criminal justice reform,” Chatfield said. “When we look at how we prosecuted and how many people we had in the system in 1979 compared to how many we have today with over doubling it, we ought to be ashamed in that we haven’t done enough for the people who are in the system here in the state of Michigan.”
Some of the suggestions by the task force include giving police more discretion to issue appearance tickets instead of arresting people, shortening the time people spend in jail between their arrest and arraignment, and reducing maximum probation terms for most felonies. It also recommends releasing more defendants before trial without requiring them to pay money.
