More than 200 University of Michigan community members, students and faculty gathered at the William Monroe Trotter Multicultural Center Saturday for a day-long symposium discussing carceral reform in Michigan. The symposium, titled “The Landscape of Criminal-Legal Reform in Michigan”, was hosted by the Carceral State Project and featured a range of sessions including “The Legacy of Michigan’s Punitive Sentencing Laws,” “Transforming Juvenile Justice” and “How to Talk to Your Legislator.”
Speakers for the session “The Legacy of Michigan’s Punitive Sentencing Laws” included Deborah LaBelle, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union who specializes in the intersection of civil rights and prisons. LaBelle told symposium attendees her goal as a lawyer is to raise awareness about and fight back against injustice in the incarceration system.
“When I became a lawyer I was determined to shine a light on the objectification and dehumanization of those who are being punished,” LaBelle said. “Torture and abuse flourishes in the darkness and the hidden places which defines our prisons. I realized looking at what was happening, that the inequities in the prison system are a reflection of the worst social inequities that we have out here. The issues with class, with race, with gender, they run large in the prisons. That is who gets punished, and that’s how they get punished, based on those criterias of who is considered problematic on the outside.”
Another speaker for the session was Ronnie Waters, a community engagement specialist at Safe & Just Michigan, described his experience with the juvenile justice system, having received a sentence of life without parole at 17 years old. When in prison, Waters joined the ACLU’s juvenile justice program and worked to retroactively challenge his sentencing and the practice of sentencing life without parole for juveniles following the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2012. Waters’ and ACLU’s challenge led to his release in 2020.
Waters told the audience this initiative by the ACLU and LaBelle to challenge life without parole for youth has brought hope to many people in the juvenile justice system.
“It brought so much hope to the people inside,” Waters said. “It transformed prisons where when you don’t think that you have an opportunity to go home, then every time someone wrongs you, then you act in a way that you think is appropriate. But when you think that you have a chance to go home, you act in a way that you know is actually appropriate and you let things slide. The efforts of LaBelle and the ACLU brought so much hope to people who had no hope.”
Panelist Jose Burgos, who works for the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, spoke in the session “Transforming Juvenile Justice.” Burgos explained during his experience in prison at the Michigan Reformatory, he was able to more clearly see the racial inequities of the carceral system.
“The very first prison that I went to, the Michigan Reformatory, I walked in there and the first thing I saw was just a body of brown and black bodies,” Burgos said. “Even though, at the time, I don’t think I was conscious enough to really understand what it was that I was seeing, there was something inside of me saying ‘there’s something wrong about this.’”
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, LSA sophomore Nkenna Nzerem, an event attendee, said she found Waters’ account enlightening in understanding the perspective of people in prisons.
“You don’t really think about the effect a life sentence can have and the mental strain of it,” Nzerem said. “I get when he said a lot of people act out because why not? If nothing else matters why would they have to behave?”
Panelist and State Sen. Jeff Irwin, D-Ann Arbor, said he is worried society is backtracking on any progress for carceral reform due to a recent increase in fear surrounding crime, despite lower crime rates. He further said this trend mirrors the trend that occurred during the “tough-on-crime” era in the 1990s.
“There was this huge welling-up of concern during the tough-on-crime time in the ’90s, but there wasn’t actually an increase in crime,” Irwin said. “We experienced that same thing in the last two years, where there’s been this big bubbling up of concern about crime, that there’s crime in the streets, and crime is out of control. It’s every night on the news trying to scare people for a particular reason.”
Irwin said he believed this phenomenon and newfound fear of crime is due to Republican influences.
“The reason we were getting all these messages, I believe, is because for the Republican Party it is valuable to their political outcome to drive people apart using fear and racism,” Irwin said. “Racism is an incredibly powerful force in American politics. It has absolutely shaped Southeast Michigan — the place we live —and Republicans are using it politically to try to drive voters toward them.”
Irwin further encouraged people to get involved in the fight for reform by speaking with their representatives about the criminal justice system.
“I would encourage you to connect with politicians,” Irwin said. “We work for you. Every single one of you has at least two employees in Lansing. You have a state representative and you have a state senator. Have you ever asked them what they think about these issues? Have you ever gone to one of their coffee hours and said, ‘Do you think that if a juvenile commits a crime, they should get some chance for parole? Do you believe in rehabilitation?’ Make them answer that question in front of their communities. The more we talk about these things, the more the right answer becomes apparent.”
In an interview with The Daily, Rackham student Ayriel Coleman said she felt the symposium was important in creating discussion around serious issues such as injustice in the carceral system.
“I feel like in the current political climate in which history is being erased as we speak, we need a mode to talk about the history of incarceration so we can remember it and prevent it from happening in the future,” Coleman said. “I feel like things such as conferences, speeches and workshops … are extremely important because they’re telling the truth of what happened and people that have been directly impacted by the punitive loss.”
Daily Staff Reporter Alyssa Tisch can be reached at tischaa@umich.edu.
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