The Michigan Community Corrections Act: Prison Diversion or Net-widening, a County Level Analysis

Abstract

The Michigan Community Corrections Act, adopted on December 29, 1988, was clearly a legislative response to prison crowding. While many of its ardent supporters valued the Act for the implicit values associated with the reform-based reallocation of correctional resources, they extolled the Act for its capacity to reduce prison and jail crowding, and still provide for offender punishment in community-based settings. Supporters were so anxious for the bill to pass, after almost ten years in development, that in the later stages of the process the language of the supporters and practitioners began to change. Almost overnight, per the advice of the legislative spin doctors, the buzzwords changed from rehabilitation and humanness to new and more marketable descriptors such as community punishment and intermediate sanctions. As is the case in many public policy initiatives, the passage of the Act represented a consensus of different constituent groups with conflicting goals. The need for a response to prison crowding conditions other than prison expansion was so critical that it brought together a varied group of legislators, corrections officials and community corrections advocates.Master of Public AdministrationPublic AdministrationUniversity of Michigan-Flinthttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143487/1/Peters.pd