MI-CEMI

MI-CEMI Vision

Everyone wants safe communities, a fair legal system, and a wise use
of taxpayer dollars. Sadly, Michigan’s system of mass incarceration fails residents on all three levels. The current punitive approach has failed to improve public safety while exacerbating racial disparities, wasting taxpayer dollars, and harming families.

Thankfully, advocates, religious communities, human service providers, and policy makers from both parties promote smart policy changes.

They are working across the criminal legal system:

• Promoting prevention and police accountability.
• Advancing court accountability and sentencing reform.
• Improving prison conditions so they are more rehabilitative and less traumatic.
• Improving reentry services so people return to their community set up to succeed and contribute.

Unfortunately, too often these efforts have been siloed, refused to share information, or succumbed to infighting, and therefore not able to make the impact that they could.

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That’s where the Michigan Collaborative to End Mass Incarceration (MI-CEMI) comes in. We foster cooperation so organizations can accomplish more together than we can alone to end mass incarceration. We support the collaborative change through:

• Amplify and mobilize: Help members achieve strength through numbers by supporting each other’s efforts.
• Coordinating convening shared strategies: to address these topics.
• Relationship building: among members that supports full inclusion.
• Project support: to help good Steering Team-approved ideas get off the ground.
• Sharing Resources: Building shared resources such as a legislation and media tracker and supporting resource sharing so that organizations can share information such as polling data or legislative analysis.
• Conflict Management: so that differences in tactics do not undermine shared goals.

MI-CEMI is a broad-based, statewide, non-partisan collaboration representing non-profit, faith-based, advocacy, grassroots, and service organizations united to end mass incarceration in Michigan. The Collaborative seeks to create and restore healthy communities.

MI-CEMI has adopted the following goals and objectives to be effective by the year 2035:

• Preventing Incarceration and Promoting Holistic Public Safety: Every community across Michigan makes use of the full toolbox of strategies to improve public safety and prevent incarceration, including alternative emergency response, community violence intervention, restorative justice diversion and deflection, and more.
• Length of Stay: There is a 50% reduction in the average length of stay of persons in prison through the implementation of sentencing and parole reforms.
• Programming and conditions: Every prison and jail provides a safe and supportive environment where everyone can grow and develop the skills they need to succeed
• Reentry: There is an annual reduction in the return-to-prison rate for returning citizens through removing barriers to reentry such as job and housing discrimination and through improving reentry supports such as peer-led reentry and access to stable housing, employment, and medical care.