Waterford Today

Michigan incarcerates children for skipping school, defiance of parents and other noncriminal acts at high rates despite the COVID-19 crisis.

State judges have shipped children off to locked detention centers for many noncriminal acts like refusing to take medication or failing to attend online learning programs according to public records, Bridge Michigan reported. Children also are being locked up for testing positive for using marijuana. Some are even locked up for disobeying their parents.

Amid reports of other states moving toward criminal reforms by focusing on retaining nonviolent juveniles who commit noncriminal offenses in the community, Michigan continues to do the complete opposite for minor offenses. The offenses that most of these children are committing aren’t actually crimes. Examples of these offenses are technical violations of their probation or status offenses like skipping school or staying out past set curfews.

A tense example of this happened last summer. The case of a Michigan teen named Grace provoked national outrage, ProPublica reported. The 15-year-old from the suburbs of Detroit was incarcerated for violating her probation by neglecting to do her online schoolwork. She was on probation for theft and assault.

Officials in Michigan say the state is completely out of line.  

“Michigan is completely out of line with the rest of the country,” said Joshua Rovner, a senior advocacy associate at The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform around the country, Bridge Michigan reported. “That is a policy choice. The whole point of Grace’s story is not that this just happened to Grace. There are hundreds of kids every year who are put in these facilities.”

Michigan Supreme Court Justice Elizabeth Clement said that people need to be held accountable for their actions. 

“If it’s not a priority from the top-down, you’re going to have the status quo," Clement said in a press release, Bridge Michigan reported. "It’ll be easy for everyone involved to say, ‘Well, no one is going to hold anybody accountable.’”

A Michigan University professor also weighed in, saying that too many kids are presently in placement.

“Much of the world has moved on, but much of our system remains stuck in the mentality that has really gone by the wayside, that no academic, that no policymaker really still believes in,” said Frank Vandervort, a professor who teaches and supervises at the University of Michigan Law School’s Juvenile Justice Clinic, said, Bridge Michigan reported.

Too many Michigan children are in placement, he said, with too few community-based resources.

“In many ways, we are two or three decades behind what is thought of in contemporary times as best practice in juvenile justice,” Vanderfort said.