Author name: Leon El-Alamin

More than $959 million was paid out in 2025 to thousands of Michigan Department of Corrections employees. The department manages 26 prisons across the state, with a population of about 33,000 incarcerated individuals, and is also responsible for probation and parole oversight.

According to current and former employees, Michigan’s newest public youth treatment center opened prematurely last summer and is now effectively being run by its residents. A lack of training and staffing—paired with several high-acuity teens—has fueled staff burnout, repeated procedural breakdowns, and major safety and security risks at the Mount Clemens facility.

“They’re still suffering from the trauma of brown water,” Dotson said of her then-14-year-old and 7-year-old. They lived off Dort Highway and Court Streets when the Flint Water Crisis started more than a decade ago, which is when they stopped taking baths to limit their exposure to lead-laced water.

Lawmakers, reform activists, and allies are calling on Gretchen Whitmer to grant medical clemency to inmate Krystal Clark at Women’s Huron Valley Prison.

After spending 28 years behind bars, Allen Burnett headed straight to the ocean upon his release. “I just stood there for a moment,” he says. “I wanted to take in the air.”

For much of his life, Burnett never believed he would experience that kind of freedom.

The Michigan Supreme Court has ruled that people who are 19 or 20 years old at the time they commit first-degree murder cannot automatically receive life sentences without parole. In its opinion, a five-justice majority said such a mandatory punishment is excessively harsh when it does not take into account the person’s youth, possible rehabilitation, and other mitigating circumstances.

The number of young adults being sentenced to life imprisonment or indeterminate terms has risen sharply over the past decade, according to reporting from The Independent. In 2024, 50 offenders between ages 18 and 20 received life or open-ended sentences, compared with 30 in 2014. A growing share of young people in prison are now serving life terms, with many facing sentences as long as — or longer than — the number of years they have lived.

Michigan State Police have launched a homicide investigation after an inmate was found dead inside a prison cell. The Michigan Department of Corrections reported that 40-year-old Joshua McGehee was discovered unresponsive on March 27 at Bellamy Creek Correctional Facility in Ionia.

A Detroit man was freed Tuesday, March 31, after spending 27 years incarcerated for a murder he maintains he did not commit. A judge vacated his conviction and dismissed all charges, clearing the way for his relea

After years of waiting, Flint residents are beginning to receive the first wave of settlement payments related to the city’s water crisis. The distribution follows a federal judge’s recent approval of partial payouts, marking a long-anticipated step forward after prolonged uncertainty.