Advocates fight for passing of stalled prison reform bill

LANSING, Mich. (WILX) - Lois Pullano and the Citizens for Prison Reform are on a mission; get Senate Bill 493 passed into law so people serving time behind bars can get protection.

But the goal feels out of reach, while the bill is stalled in a Michigan House of Representatives committee.

"This all started for me back in 2007, when my minor son was sent into the adult system with a known mental illness," Pullano said. "And I had no clue what was going on inside our systems."

Senate Bill 493 was passed in the Michigan Senate last year, before being handed off to the Government Operations Committee.

That's why the Citizens gathered at the State Capitol Thursday to knock on the doors of House Speaker Joe Tate (D-Detroit) and other lawmakers, hoping they'll conduct a hearing on the bill after a year without action.

However, due to a busy afternoon at the Capitol, neither Speaker Tate nor members of the committee were able to speak with the Citizen's group.

The proposal aims to make changes to the office of the Legislative Corrections Ombudsman, or the nonpartisan person who investigates complaints against the state prison system.

"It is only a legislator or a prisoner that can file a complaint by law," Pullano said. "Yes, he takes complaints by families, but this would actually enshrine it."

It's only one of several changes written into the bill, in addition to requiring public monthly incident reports from the Ombudsman, and the implementation of an official complaint form that families and advocates could have access to.

The bill would also allow the Ombudsman to consult with experts who could lend a hand with investigations, with final approval from the Michigan Department of Corrections.

To drive their point home, the Citizens enlisted the support of a research group from the Michigan State University Sociology Department.

Students there worked to compile data from Michigan's state prisons and compare it with data collected from the Michigan Department of Corrections. They soon noticed several discrepancies in their respective incident reports.

For example, while the Department of Corrections reported 88 prisoner suicide attempts last year, individual state prison reports showed there were 360 total attempts. That's four times more than the state said there were.

"It's not just suicides that are being misreported, it's assaults, drug possession, it's all sorts of instances that aren't being reported accurately," said student researcher Sophia Futo.

It's those pieces of mixed information that the Citizens for Prison Reform is trying to set straight, holding out hope that Senate Bill 493 will be passed before the end of the year.

"We need transparency and accountability, and it is missing in this system," Pullano said.