Michigan’s prison system has undergone a culture change from locking up law breakers for as long as possible to being more selective about whom to put behind bars, state Corrections Director Patricia Caruso told officials at a prisoner re-entry conference Tuesday.
The state closed 10 prisons last year and has curbed its prison population from 51,500 to 45,000 since 2007, Caruso said. The number of women prisoners has been cut by 30 percent. That reverses a build-up trend that lasted a couple of decades.Michigan’s prison system has undergone a culture change from locking up law breakers for as long as possible to being more selective about whom to put behind bars, state Corrections Director Patricia Caruso told officials at a prisoner re-entry conference Tuesday.
“We went from a small prison system, a medium system, to a huge prison system because we could,” Caruso said. She added there was “no push-back” because communities wanted the jobs that prisons provided and others “didn’t have the political will to stop us.”