Policy Clearinghouse Home

Welcome to the University of Michigan Law School Policy Clearinghouse, a project of Professor Margo Schlanger. Launching in November 2014, this site aggregates state policy documents that are otherwise difficult to locate.  It will expand over time, but to begin with, it will focus on prison and jail policy.  As of 2014, it includes policies, from nearly every state prison system and a dozen or so of the nation’s largest jails, governing prisoner grievances, mail and publications, and visiting.  It also includes inmate handbooks—some state-wide, others facility-specific—from nearly all the states.  And it includes previously unavailable grievance statistics covering varying periods from 2007 to 2014, for about twenty states.  Many of these documents were posted by the relevant governmental entity, but for many more a state Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request was necessary.  (Those FOIA requests, made by University of Michigan law students, are also posted.) 

The most effective way to search for documents is usually to use the “sort” or “filter” functionality of the search fields, below.  But if that doesn’t work, you can search the database by using the search feature below with any keywords (Note: the search function is looking at the database descriptors, not the underlying documents.  Unfortunately, full-text searching of the documents is not available at this time.) 

As researchers use the posted resources to write reports, we will post those reports here​.

We are working to expand this collection to include other topics within prisons and jails, and other policy areas.  If you have documents you’d like to propose for inclusion, let us know. [email protected]