By JAKKAR AIMERY
Capital News Service
LANSING — Allegations of discrimination and civil rights violations against prisoners in the state is drawing increased attention, and organizations including the Michigan Department of Civil Rights and the NAACP, are making the issue a priority.
And on a national level, President Joe Biden has directed the U.S. Department of Justice to end its use of private prisons and pledged to advance racial equity.
Those actions have garnered the attention of individuals working to end the federal use of private prisons, as well as reducing racial, civil and human rights disparities in the criminal justice system more broadly as a result of rising racial tensions in the country.
Department of Civil Rights Director James White said a special investigative unit responds to complaints filed by prisoners.
“What’s been recognized is this: ‘Yes, this person committed a crime and was convicted, but that does not mean that this person does not have rights under Elliot-Larsen,’” White said, referring to the 1976 state law that prohibits discrimination based on religion, race, color, national origin, age, sex, height, weight, family status and marital status.
White, a former assistant police chief in Detroit, said his department is determined to take a closer look at identifying which areas impacted an individual’s incarceration and complaints against the Department of Corrections.
“Whatever they bring to us, we’re going to look at it,” he said.
“We’re going to peel back every layer and conduct quality investigations, and that’s something that a few years ago was not the case,” White said. He also said the department is increasing its resources for looking into such complaints.
Additionally, other groups in the state are raising concerns around alleged human and civil rights violations in the prison system, including disparate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chui Karega, the general counsel for the Detroit chapter of the NAACP, said the organization has made demands to the Corrections Department concerning precautions to keep prisoners safe, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Residents of the Michigan Department of Corrections have no ability to determine where they will be, who they will be with and, in many cases, what their opportunity will be to wash their hands and their body,” Karega said. “Once the institution takes custody of them, the institution has an obligation to protect them.”
Those demands include releasing medically frail residents to their families, releasing nonviolent offenders and placing them under house arrest, upgrading prison medical facilities and reducing the number of inmates living close to one another due to their limited ability to socially distance.
Karega said that while he applauds the state making a priority of COVID-19 protections and vaccines for correctional officers and staff, those same measures should be taken for inmates.
The Corrections Department website says that in addition to prisoners having access to soap and copays being waived for prisoners being tested for COVID-19, it has increased access to restrooms and has directed Michigan State Industries, a manufacturer operating inside the prisons, to increase soap production.
“We believe that what we’re doing is protecting the population and is saving lives because we are one of the only states – if not the only state – that has the most aggressive testing policy in the country,” said department public information officer Chris Gautz. “We test every prisoner basically every week and, in some cases, they’re tested every day if they’re in a facility that has been exposed to the British variant.”
Gautz said that because a significant number of prisons are in rural areas, the department has coordinated with hospitals in larger areas with a greater capacity to accomodate prisoners who test positive, are elderly or have underlying medical conditions.
Additionally, the department said it will continue to urge prisoners to socially distance when possible, as well as limit the number of people seated during meals and seat prisoners further apart. For those granted parole, the department said they must be tested before being released and if they test positive, they will not be paroled until they are cleared by a health care provider.
“We’ve been on top of this from the beginning and have been making every effort to ensure that they have the best access to care,” Gautz said. “We’ve tested more prisoners than places like California and Texas who have three times as many prisoners as we do, we’ve offered the vaccine to every employee that works in our prisons and more than a third of our prisoners have been vaccinated,” he said.
Gautz also said that within the next two or three weeks, every prisoner will have been offered the vaccine, making Michigan one of the only states to have done that.
To highlight what she said are disparities in prisoners’ human rights, Elizabeth Bradshaw, a professor of sociology at Central Michigan University, recently wrote an article titled: “Do Prison Lives Matter?”
She said that national COVID-19 death rates in prison were 39 per 100,000, which was higher than the U.S. population rate of 29 per 100,000.
“We could encourage Gov. (Gretchen) Whitmer to allow more people to be released — some kind of executive action for folks who were involved in nonviolent convictions or have served a particular amount of their sentence. (That) would be one moderate way to lessen the prison population and creating more space for social distancing,” Bradshaw said.
She said that while Michigan’s prison population has dropped significantly over the last year due to increasing the number of paroles, the conditions of the pandemic should stimulate and produce similar policies to protect inmates’ lives.
“I do have hope that this is the right time for criminal justice reform, especially because of the racial justice movements,” Bradshaw said.
And Karega said, “Being incarcerated is a human rights issue. The NAACP stands up for residents of the state because we believe in redemption.”