“Mass Incarceration in Michigan” is an ongoing CSP research initiative that launched in January 2025 to investigate Michigan’s criminal legal system and especially to document how and why the state’s majority Black prison population expanded from fewer than 8,000 people in the early 1970s to a peak of more than 50,000 people in the early 2000s. The initiative focuses on topics including mandatory-minimum sentencing, restrictions on parole, the role of policing agencies and prosecutors, expansion of the prison system, and advocacy groups that both supported and resisted this punitive escalation of the carceral state.
The research team is working on a series of a dozen multimedia reports and a companion website that trace these developments from the 1970s through the early 2000s and will be published below as they are completed. The initiative is co-directed by Matt Lassiter and Stephen Cassidy Jones and involves more than twenty undergraduate and graduate students. Our partners include Safe & Just Michigan, Michigan Center for Youth Justice, and the AFSC-Michigan Criminal Justice program–also the organizations that co-organized the CSP’s March 2025 symposium “The Landscape of Criminal Legal Reform.” Other CSP research initiatives are closely related–especially Confronting Conditions of Confinement, the Juvenile Justice Initiative, and Policing and Criminalization.
Research Reports
