In a move to address long-standing mobility issues, the MDOC recently delivered 90 wheelchairs to Michigan’s sole women’s prison. The shipment follows an investigation by Disability Rights Michigan that exposed a dire shortage of equipment, effectively trapping some residents and causing them to miss basic needs. While advocates described the situation as a long-term failure, this new equipment aims to rectify the safety hazards identified in the report.

Even as she was led away in handcuffs by police, Claire McClinton’s resolve remained clear. The yellow tape used by her group to mark their protest at the state Capitol was gone, and her cardboard “tombstone” for clean water had been seized. Despite the chaos, her crisp white shirt still carried the day’s essential message: four years of the Flint water crisis was four years too many.

A Michigan prison has become the site of a fourth suspected inmate homicide in five weeks. Since late March, deaths have been reported almost weekly across four prisons, with all incidents under review by the Michigan State Police.

In 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan changed its water source to save money, a decision that exposed tens of thousands of residents to dangerous levels of lead. Children were harmed. Families were let down. And for years, government at every level failed to act. In that moment, LaShaya Darisaw emerged—not as a bystander, but as an organizer driven by conviction and equipped with the strategy to respond.

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.