What would you say if I told you that the State of Michigan was allowing judges and prosecutors to drain Michigan families and taxpayers dry? Would you believe me?
Not through corruption in the classic sense, and not through isolated misconduct, but through a system that authorizes enormous financial harm without requiring even the most basic cost accounting. Every time incarceration is imposed when a less expensive, less destructive option would suffice, the state absorbs the bill and children absorb the fallout. The damage is not abstract; it’s entirely predictable. The costs are measurable.
And inexplicably, the decision-making process that produces them remains largely insulated from any meaningful fiscal scrutiny.
Michigan counties make choices that fracture families. Those choices do not stay “local.” They travel. They show up in Medicaid spending, special education needs, foster care caseloads, housing instability, and long-term disability. And they show up in the state corrections budget, which Michigan itself reports at roughly $49,290 per incarcerated person per year in FY 2025. And that’s just on average; it doesn’t account for costs incurred for aging populations.
If a county repeatedly chooses incarceration when a less harmful, evidence-based option exists, it should not be able to offload the financial and human wreckage onto the rest of Michigan. There should be repercussions that create a disincentive for harmful behavior.
Not rhetorical scolding. Not another commission report. A bill for the financial damage.
The principle is simple: if a county’s incarceration practices predictably destabilize children and impose measurable economic harm on the state, the county should be financially accountable for the excess cost it generates.
The Collateral Damage Is Not Collateral.
At any given time, an estimated 2.7 million children in the United States have a parent in prison or jail, and over 5.2 million have experienced parental incarceration at some point in their lives. That is not a niche population. That is a structural reality.
The scholarly literature is consistent: parental incarceration is associated with worse outcomes for kids across health and education.
Health Impacts are Measurable
Research links parental incarceration to elevated odds of multiple mental and physical health problems, including depression, PTSD, anxiety, asthma, and migraines. Reviews of the evidence similarly find associations between parental incarceration and adverse physical health outcomes from infancy through adulthood.
School Impacts Follow the Instability
Youth with incarcerated parents show significantly worse school-based outcomes in large samples, including disciplinary issues and diminished engagement. Other work finds paternal incarceration associated with early grade retention.
The Long Tail is Expensive
The costs do not end when a parent comes home. Studies link parental incarceration to a broad range of psychiatric, social, and functional harms that carry forward into young adulthood.
And yes, some of these harms can translate into long-term public benefit reliance. Disability programs like SSI are not a clean “incarceration pipeline,” and Michigan does not publish a neat statistic for “children of incarcerated parents who later receive SSI.” But it is not controversial to say this: trauma-linked mental health conditions and functional impairment can become lifelong, costly, and publicly subsidized. The system creates the risk, then never budgets for the aftermath and harm it creates.
If counties want to insist incarceration is “public safety,” they should also be required to own the public invoice.
The Missing Structural Accountability
If Michigan is serious about fiscal responsibility and child well being, incarceration cannot remain exempt from the same cost scrutiny applied to every other public intervention. Counties make charging and sentencing recommendations. Counties fund jails. Counties experience the downstream fallout when families destabilize. Yet the costs borne by children rarely appear anywhere in the official record.
That gap is not accidental. It is structural.
Michigan already knows how to do this. We require environmental impact statements before construction. We demand fiscal notes for legislation. We conduct cost-effectiveness reviews for Medicaid programs. Incarceration remains one of the few policy areas where the most destructive outcomes are treated as collateral rather than costs.
The question is not whether counties can afford to change. It is whether Michigan can afford not to.
Children who cycle through trauma-driven disability, school failure, and lifelong economic marginalization represent a quiet but enormous public liability and health crisis. Counties that destabilize families through unnecessary incarceration are not saving money. They are deferring the bill and sending it to the next generation.
No private business would survive if it operated this way. No board would tolerate executives who refused to run cost–benefit analysis before making six- and seven-figure decisions. No regulator would look the other way while a company repeatedly harmed the very people it depended on and then billed the public for the cleanup. Yet we accept this conduct from the criminal legal system as if it were inevitable. We allow the State of Michigan to impose enormous, predictable costs without basic accounting, and we allow small, rural counties like Barry County to destabilize families, generate avoidable appeals, and offload the financial wreckage onto taxpayers who had no say in the decision.
Accountability is not radical. It is the minimum standard everywhere else. The question is not why the Fit Bench framework should exist. It is why we have tolerated its absence for so long.
The Solution: A Three-Pillar Accountability Framework
Michigan should enact a sentencing accountability framework with three pillars:
- Mandatory Cost-Benefit Analysis in the Presentencing Investigation Report (PSIR) for incarceration decisions, including child impact and appellate risk. For example, we know Judge Schipper has a history of exceeding sentencing guidelines, he creates a high appellate risk.
- County Excess-Cost Penalties when sentencing patterns exceed established cost thresholds.
- Fit Bench Public Cost Tracking that assigns responsibility to decision-makers and makes patterns visible.
If incarceration is truly the “last resort,” then Michigan should stop funding fiscally irresponsible counties like Barry that treat it like the first draft.
Pillar One: Mandatory Cost–Benefit Analysis in Sentencing
A Presentence Investigation Report already weighs risk, criminal history, and supervision options. Adding a mandatory Cost–Benefit Analysis (CBA) would force decision makers to confront the full public price of incarceration before a sentence is imposed.
Michigan already treats the Presentence Investigation Report as the backbone of sentencing. Add one more required section: a cost-benefit analysis that forces the court to confront three categories of impact before imposing incarceration beyond what is absolutely necessary.
What the PSIR cost-benefit section should include
Direct state cost of incarceration
MDOC’s published annual per-person cost.
Child health impacts
Including elevated rates of asthma, depression, anxiety, and adverse childhood experiences among children with incarcerated parents
Educational disruption
Including absenteeism, grade retention, special education placement, and dropout risk
Public benefit reliance
Including increased likelihood of long-term SSI enrollment for trauma-related disability
Foster care and child welfare involvement
Often triggered by parental incarceration rather than neglect
Family destabilization risk factors
Minor children in the home, caregiver stability, housing risk, school disruption risk, and documented trauma indicators.
County-level alternatives and their costs
Supervision and community-based options are materially cheaper than incarceration. Michigan has reported supervision costs around $5,000 per year per person in prior fiscal analyses. (Even if a county’s diversion program costs more than basic supervision, it is still rarely in the same universe as prison.)
Appeal risk and downstream appellate costs
A sentence that wildly departs from norms raises the probability of appeals, remands, resentencing, and additional litigation. Those costs are real, and they are predictable.
Intergenerational justice-system contact
Which compounds costs over decades
The research is unequivocal. Children with incarcerated parents experience significantly higher rates of behavioral health disorders, developmental delays, and school failure compared to their peers. Longitudinal studies link parental incarceration to increased likelihood of disability claims in adulthood, particularly where early trauma went untreated. The public ends up paying again and again for a decision framed as “tough on crime.” As I have said multiple times in the past, “Tough on Crime” means not just “Dumb on Data” and additionally, fiscally irresponsible.
This should not be optional. It should be a required part of lawful sentencing.
Pillar Two: Penalizing Counties That Externalize Harm
A Cost–Benefit Analysis without consequences is theater. If counties exceed defined harm thresholds, penalties must follow. Those penalties should be calibrated to discourage overuse of incarceration while funding repair.
A cost-benefit section without consequences becomes a paperwork ritual. Michigan needs a trigger.
A workable framework could include:
Mandatory CBA Thresholds
The state establishes evidence-based cost ceilings for incarceration, inclusive of child and family impacts. The state sets a cost threshold band tied to offense severity and guideline ranges.
County Overrun Penalties
When sentencing patterns exceed thresholds, counties incur financial penalties proportionate to the excess harm generated. If a county’s sentencing practices produce incarceration costs that exceed the threshold, the county pays an excess-cost assessment into a state fund.
Reinvestment Requirements
Penalty funds are earmarked for child mental health care, school-based supports, family stabilization services, and community supervision alternatives. The fund directly supports the systems that absorb the most damage: child mental health services, school-based supports, caregiver stabilization, and reentry.
Public Transparency
County-level dashboards publish incarceration decisions, projected versus actual costs, and child impact indicators.
This is not punishment for counties. It is alignment. When decision makers bear the costs of their decisions, behavior changes.
Counties that incarcerate responsibly would pay little or nothing. Counties that treat prison like a reflex would finally feel the price of their choices.
Pillar Three: Fit Bench – Judicial Accountability Through Outcome Tracking
A Cost–Benefit Analysis at sentencing addresses county behavior. Fit Bench addresses judicial behavior. The two are complementary, and together they close a loophole that has allowed unnecessary incarceration to persist without consequence.
Fit Bench is designed to measure judicial fitness through outcomes, not rhetoric. It operates through an eight-category evaluation framework that captures observable, repeatable performance indicators. Category 8 — Fiscal and Economic Competence — is uniquely suited to track the real costs judges impose when incarceration is chosen over diversion, supervision, or family-preserving alternatives.
Under a Fit Bench framework, each sentencing decision would generate a Judicial Impact Ledger tied to that judge, aggregating over time and comparing projected versus actual costs.
What Fit Bench Would Track
Fit Bench would not second-guess lawful discretion. It would document avoidable harm where less expensive and less destructive options were available and supported by evidence.
Fit Bench is built for exactly this kind of accountability gap: the system keeps cost data diffuse so no one “owns” the harm and no one can be held accountable.
Key metrics would include:
Incarceration Cost Delta
The difference between the cost of incarceration and the cost of available diversion or community-based supervision recommended in the Presentence Report.
Incarceration Variance Index
Degree and frequency of divergence from guideline ranges, by offense type and defendant profile.
Family Disruption Index
Whether the sentence resulted in child separation, foster care placement, or documented educational disruption, weighted by duration and severity.
Downstream Public Cost Triggers
Subsequent involvement of affected children with Medicaid behavioral health services, special education, child welfare, or SSI, where parental incarceration was a precipitating factor.
Appeal and Reversal Costs
Tracking unnecessary appeals, remands, and reversals tied to sentencing decisions that ignored statutory alternatives or proportionality principles.
Appeal Churn Rate
Percentage of cases from a judge’s docket that generate appellate relief, remands, resentencing, or reversals, normalized by docket volume.
Excess Incarceration Exposure
Aggregate dollars of incarceration exposure above guideline-based baselines, using MDOC cost figures.
Recidivism Versus Stability Outcomes
Comparing outcomes where incarceration was imposed against similarly situated cases where family-preserving alternatives were used.
Family Destabilization Risk Flags
Presence of minor children, primary caregiver status, documented school disruption risk, and child welfare involvement.
Diversion Omission Flags
Cases where diversion was available, recommended, or plausibly appropriate, but not meaningfully evaluated.
Cost-to-Harm Ratio
A composite score that weighs dollars spent against measurable destabilization indicators.
Over time, this produces a comparative judicial cost profile. Judges whose decisions consistently generate higher public expense and worse family outcomes would no longer be shielded by anecdote or tradition. The data would speak.
What categories this would trigger on Fit Bench
Under Fit Bench’s eight-category evaluation framework, patterns of cost-blind or economically reckless sentencing would trigger flags across multiple domains:
- Category 1: Cognitive Tracking – Inability to track or integrate cost information presented in PSIRs
- Category 2: Legal Accuracy – Repeated proportionality violations that ignore guideline ranges and generate excessive sentences
- Category 7: Resistance to Correction – Continuing cost-blind sentencing patterns after appellate reversals
- Category 8: Fiscal and Economic Competence – Systematic failure to consider fiscal consequences, repeated excess incarceration costs, pattern of generating avoidable appeals, and inability to perform or verify basic sentencing cost calculations
Fit Bench does not need to speculate about motives. It just needs to show the ledger.
If a judge’s decisions repeatedly cost Michigan hundreds of thousands of dollars per case in excess incarceration exposure, while destabilizing children in entirely predictable ways, the public deserves to see that pattern. And the judicial system should treat it as a professional issue, not a personality conflict.
Why This Matters
Judicial discretion is powerful precisely because it shapes lives. But discretion without feedback becomes distortion.
Right now, judges face no institutional signal when a sentence:
- Costs the state more than necessary
- Destabilizes children who were not at risk
- Increases long-term public benefit reliance
- Generates avoidable appeals and litigation
Fit Bench changes that by making economic and human consequences visible. Not as punishment, but as governance.
The Missing Feedback Loop
Michigan’s justice system currently tracks convictions, case flow, and compliance. What it does not track is harm efficiency.
Fit Bench supplies the missing feedback loop. It connects sentencing decisions to real-world costs borne by children, families, and taxpayers. It ensures that maintaining a family, when lawful and appropriate, is recognized not as leniency but as sound public finance.
If incarceration is truly necessary, the data will support it. If it is not, the cost will finally be counted.
And once harm is counted, it can no longer be ignored.
Incentives, Not Retaliation
Fit Bench is not about shaming individual judges. It is about aligning incentives with outcomes Michigan already claims to value: fiscal responsibility, child welfare, and public safety.
Used properly, Fit Bench data could inform:
- Judicial performance evaluations
- Continuing education requirements
- Sentencing guideline revisions
- Reassignment or mentoring in high-harm courts
- Legislative oversight hearings
When judges see that unnecessary incarceration inflates public costs and destabilizes families, behavior changes. When counties see judges generating costly appeals and reversals, policies shift. Accountability becomes systemic rather than personal.
The Hidden Cost of Appeals: When Excessive Sentencing Multiplies the Tab
Every unnecessary appeal is an added layer of cost created by avoidable error.
Michigan’s Court of Appeals receives thousands of new filings annually. In 2024 it received 4,833 new case filings. The operating costs of that appellate system are not neatly billed per case, but the state does appropriate substantial funding to run it. One budget listing for Michigan’s judiciary includes a Court of Appeals line item of $27,733,200.
If you do simple division, that is roughly $5,700 per new filing in Court of Appeals operational cost alone, before you even account for attorney time, transcripts, county-paid appointed appellate counsel, and the opportunity cost of court resources. Or, before someone is sent through the system multiple times (That estimate is illustrative, not a formal per-case accounting.).
Indigent appellate defense costs add more. Michigan’s MAACS roster attorney rates increased to roughly $137 to $149 per hour, with a reimbursement structure that still requires county payment up front. Appeals are labor-intensive. A single felony appeal can require extensive transcript review, record assembly, briefing, and oral argument preparation.
And then there is the cost that dwarfs all of it: incarceration during the process. Michigan’s own reported cost per incarcerated person per year is roughly $49,290.
So when a judge imposes an excessive sentence that predictably triggers appeals, the state pays more to cage someone longer, and also pays to litigate the error it made.
Case Study: Judge Michael Schipper and the Cost of “Sentencing by Temper Tantrum”
Judge Michael Schipper of Barry County Circuit Court provides a documented example of how the absence of fiscal accountability in sentencing creates measurable, preventable harm. His pattern of excessive sentencing, mathematical incompetence, and resistance to appellate correction has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly millions, in avoidable public costs while destabilizing families across multiple cases.
Prior Clutch reporting has analyzed Judge Schipper’s conduct using the Fit-Bench framework across cases including People v Handley, Riddle, Velasquez, and Arizola. The appellate record in these cases demonstrates repeated guideline violations, improper injection of constitutionally suspect factors (including immigration status and protected family advocacy), procedural breakdowns, and continued defiance of appellate correction.
What follows is a Fit Bench cost analysis using the publicly documented Arizola case as the primary example, demonstrating how Category 8 (Fiscal and Economic Competence) captures the financial damage created by cost-blind sentencing.
Step 1: Define the “excess incarceration” window
Clutch reports that in People v Arizola, the guidelines were 19 to 76 months, but the sentence imposed was 240 to 480 months, and the Court of Appeals required resentencing that still went over guidelines and resulted in 120 to 480 months.
Even using the resentenced minimum, the minimum term remained materially above the top of the reported guideline range.
A conservative “excess incarceration exposure” calculation could be:
- Compare the imposed minimum to the top guideline minimum (76 months).
- Excess minimum exposure at 240 months: 240 − 76 = 164 months (13.67 years).
- Excess minimum exposure at 120 months: 120 − 76 = 44 months (3.67 years).
Step 2: Convert excess incarceration into dollars
Using MDOC’s FY2025 average annual cost of $49,290:
13.67 years × $49,290 ≈ $673,000 in excess incarceration exposure (rough estimate).
3.67 years × $49,290 ≈ $181,000 in excess incarceration exposure after resentencing.
This is not even counting medical cost inflation as people age in custody, or the secondary costs to families.
Step 3: Add the appeal and resentencing costs
Illustrative components:
Court of Appeals operational cost proxy: about $5,700 per filing (based on 2024 filings and a cited appropriation line item).
Appellate counsel time: if 120 hours at $145/hour, that is $17,400 in attorney fees alone (illustrative), using MAACS rates.
Transcript preparation, record production, trial court resentencing hearings, prosecutor time, and clerk time: variable, but real.
Then multiply it by multiple cases. When a sentencing pattern produces repeated appeals and resentencings, it becomes a county-created spending machine.
Step 4: Compare to diversion and family preservation
Michigan’s own published comparisons have put supervision costs around $5,000 per year per person in some fiscal reporting. Even if you assume a robust diversion plan costs $10,000 to $15,000 per year with treatment supports, the delta between prison and diversion remains enormous.
And diversion is not only cheaper. It is less likely to detonate a child’s stability. The research base on the harms to children from parental incarceration is strong.
The Fit Bench takeaway
All of that, and the case is now at the court of appeals a second time. That’s twice over that appellate costs will be incurred. And that’s not accounting at all for it if has to go to the Michigan Supreme Court.
A judge does not get to ignore math because the robe feels moral. When a sentencing practice repeatedly drives avoidable incarceration and avoidable appeals, that is not “tough.” It is financially reckless.
Judge Schipper’s Fit Bench Profile: Eight Categories of Documented Risk
The Fit Bench framework evaluates judicial performance across eight categories. Judge Schipper’s documented record triggers all of them, creating a comprehensive profile of judicial dysfunction with measurable fiscal consequences.
Fit-Bench Scorecard
Subject: Judge Michael Schipper Jurisdiction: Barry County Circuit Court
Role: Circuit Court Judge Review Window: Multiple cases across 2023–2025
| Category | Status | Observable Indicators |
|---|---|---|
| Category 1: Cognitive Tracking | ●●● | Confusion across hearings, inconsistent factual framing, reliance on prosecutors to calculate offense variables. |
| Category 2: Legal Accuracy | ●●● | Repeated sentencing guideline violations after appellate vacatur and remand, misapplication of controlling law. |
| Category 3: Impulse Control | ●●● | On-the-record escalation toward defendants and counsel, emotionally driven sentencing responses. |
| Category 4: Neutrality and Bias Risk | ●●● | Immigration status raised as a sentencing factor in People v. Velasquez; protected speech and family advocacy treated as aggravating in People v. Arizola. |
| Category 5: Procedural Control | ●●● | Frequent hearing cancellations without proper notice, including in People v. Handley, plus inconsistent enforcement of scheduling, notice, and access practices. |
| Category 6: Health and Safety Risk Flags | ●●● | Age-linked cognitive risk window and history of contact football increasing head-injury probability. |
| Category 7: Resistance to Correction | ●●● | Continuation of unlawful sentencing practices after multiple Court of Appeals reversals and instructions. |
| Category 8: Fiscal and Economic Competence | ●●● | Repeated inability to perform sentencing math without prosecutorial assistance; pattern of excessive sentences generating hundreds of thousands in excess incarceration costs (e.g., Arizola: ~$673,000 initial excess exposure, ~$181,000 post-resentencing); high appeal churn rate requiring costly resentencing proceedings; systematic disregard of cost-benefit alternatives in sentencing. |
Overall Flag: ● High Risk
Summary: Judge Schipper triggers seven high-risk Fit-Bench categories, reflecting a systemic pattern of legal unreliability, procedural breakdowns, fiscal recklessness, and resistance to correction across cases.
Note: Fit-Bench is a performance screen, not a diagnosis. It identifies observable risk patterns that warrant confidential fitness review in any safety-sensitive profession.
Understanding the Category Failures
Category 1 & 2: Cognitive Tracking and Legal Accuracy
Judge Schipper has demonstrated repeated difficulty performing basic sentencing calculations—offense variables and guideline ranges—often requiring prosecutorial assistance. When those calculations were still found to be incorrect after assistance, the issue became diagnostic rather than clerical. His repeated misapplication of sentencing law, even after appellate correction, reflects both cognitive tracking difficulties and fundamental legal accuracy failures.
Category 3 & 4: Impulse Control and Neutrality
The appellate record documents emotionally driven sentencing responses, escalation toward defendants and counsel, and the injection of impermissible factors into sentencing. In People v. Velasquez, he raised immigration status as a sentencing factor. In People v. Arizola, the prosecutor acknowledged to the Court of Appeals that the defendant’s family’s protected advocacy was treated as relevant. Family members who spoke, complained, or advocated were consistently treated as aggravating rather than protected; a pattern reflecting both impulse control failures and bias risk.
Category 5: Procedural Control
Multiple cases reflect procedural breakdowns including hearing cancellations without proper notice (documented in People v. Handley), inconsistent scheduling practices, and failures to properly exercise writs ensuring defendants were informed of proceedings.
Category 6: Health and Safety Risk Flags
Judge Schipper, estimated to be in his early 60s, sits within the age range where mild cognitive impairment, early neurodegenerative disease, and head-injury related decline most commonly first appear. His publicly acknowledged history of contact football—a sport where approximately one in five players sustain head injury in a given season—raises the risk profile when combined with his documented performance patterns. These conditions rarely present as memory loss; they manifest as judgment errors, emotional volatility, rigidity, and difficulty applying complex rules under pressure.
Category 7: Resistance to Correction
Despite multiple Court of Appeals reversals, remands, and explicit instructions, Judge Schipper has continued the same sentencing practices. He has characterized Michigan’s sentencing guidelines as merely “created by people in Lansing,” treating them as optional even after appellate courts vacated his sentences and ordered compliance. This represents entrenched unreliability rather than isolated error.
Category 8: Fiscal and Economic Competence
The Arizola case alone demonstrates approximately $673,000 in initial excess incarceration exposure, reduced to approximately $181,000 after court-ordered resentencing; costs that could have been avoided entirely through guideline-compliant sentencing. When multiplied across multiple cases generating similar patterns, the aggregate fiscal harm to Michigan taxpayers becomes staggering. His repeated inability to perform sentencing math, systematic disregard of cost-benefit considerations, and high appeal churn rate represent measurable fiscal recklessness.
The Cost of Judicial Dysfunction
By the Fit Bench framework’s own scoring, Judge Schipper triggers all eight risk categories before any additional medical information is even required. The documented pattern spans cognitive function, legal accuracy, impulse control, neutrality, procedural reliability, resistance to correction, and fiscal competence.
None of this requires speculation about what is happening inside his brain. The law does not require diagnosis. It requires competence, neutrality, and adherence to governing rules. When a judge repeatedly defies sentencing law, injects impermissible factors into punishment, retaliates against protected advocacy, continues doing so after appellate intervention, and generates hundreds of thousands of dollars in avoidable public costs, the issue is no longer disagreement. It is performance.
This is exactly why Michigan’s current system is so dangerous. No other safety-sensitive profession leaves this kind of risk unmeasured. Airline pilots, surgeons, police officers, and even commercial drivers are screened when patterns like this appear. Judges, uniquely, are not.
If Michigan had implemented the accountability framework proposed in this article—mandatory cost-benefit analysis in PSIRs, county penalties for excess costs, and Fit Bench tracking with Category 8—Judge Schipper’s pattern would have triggered intervention long before the damage compounded. Instead, Michigan taxpayers absorbed hundreds of thousands in excess incarceration costs, families were unnecessarily separated, children experienced preventable trauma, and the appellate system spent scarce resources correcting avoidable errors.
Cognitive Capacity and Mathematical Competence as a Judicial Fitness Issue
Cost–benefit analysis assumes a baseline capacity that is rarely stated aloud but absolutely required: the ability to understand, apply, and verify basic quantitative reasoning. When a judge cannot reliably perform or oversee elementary sentencing math, that is not a stylistic flaw. It is a functional one.
Michigan’s sentencing framework relies on numerical accuracy. Offense Variables, Prior Record Variables, guideline ranges, and proportionality analysis are all math-dependent. When those calculations are wrong, the resulting sentence is not merely harsh or lenient. It is unlawful.
Within the Fit Bench framework, repeated difficulty performing or supervising basic sentencing calculations raises a competence signal, not a disagreement signal.
In the case of Judge Michael Schipper, publicly documented appellate records and prior Clutch Justice reporting reflect instances where the court required assistance calculating Offense Variables, and where sentencing math was still later found to be inaccurate across multiple cases. When miscalculations persist despite assistance, the issue ceases to be clerical. It becomes diagnostic.
Fit Bench treats this kind of pattern as a cognitive and functional risk indicator, particularly when it intersects with discretionary decisions that carry massive financial and human consequences.
A judge who cannot accurately apply sentencing math cannot meaningfully assess:
- Guideline proportionality
- Cost deltas between incarceration and diversion
- The financial exposure created by excessive minimums
- The downstream probability of appellate reversal
That inability directly increases:
- Excess incarceration costs borne by the state
- Appeal frequency and resentencing proceedings
- Family destabilization driven by unlawful or disproportionate confinement
Within Fit Bench, this would trigger review under multiple categories:
- Category 1: Cognitive Tracking – Repeated numerical error affecting liberty interests and inability to integrate quantitative information
- Category 2: Legal Accuracy – Unlawful sentences resulting from miscalculation
- Category 7: Resistance to Correction – Persistence of mathematical errors despite assistance and appellate guidance
- Category 8: Fiscal and Economic Competence – Avoidable public cost tied to miscalculation, inability to assess cost deltas between sentencing options, and decision-making built on incorrect inputs
This is not about intent. It is about capacity.
Judicial independence does not exempt judges from the cognitive requirements of the role. When a position requires sustained numerical reasoning and cost awareness, repeated inability to perform that reasoning is itself a matter of public concern. The system already recognizes this principle in other domains. Judges are removed or restricted for incapacity, not malice.
Fit Bench simply applies that same logic to sentencing math and cost literacy.
If a judge cannot do the math, cannot verify the math, and cannot understand the consequences of getting the math wrong, then the problem is not discretion. The problem is fitness.
The Professional Consequences Michigan Should Consider
If a judge cannot, or will not, integrate basic fiscal and social reality into sentencing discretion, Michigan should treat that as a competency problem.
Possible consequence pathways include:
- Required remedial education on sentencing economics and collateral consequences
- Enhanced appellate monitoring for outlier patterns
- Administrative reassignment from certain case types when patterns persist
- Public performance reporting that includes cost metrics
- Judicial tenure review triggers tied to repeated, documented excess-cost patterns
The point is not humiliation. The point is harm prevention.
Michigan cannot keep paying for family destabilization like it is an unavoidable natural disaster. It is policy. It is discretion. It is choice.
Accountability is the Disincentive. Transparency is the Mechanism.
Accountability is the disincentive. Transparency is the mechanism. And children should never be the hidden line item.
Sources
- Bureau of Justice Statistics. Parents in Prison and Their Minor Children.
- National Academies of Sciences. The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Study.
- Urban Institute. Children of Incarcerated Parents: Addressing the Hidden Costs of Incarceration.
- Turney, K. (2014). Stress Proliferation Across Generations? Examining the Relationship Between Parental Incarceration and Childhood Health. Journal of Health and Social Behavior.
- Wildeman, C., & Wakefield, S. (2014). The Long Arm of the Law: The Concentration of Incarceration in Families. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
- Michigan Department of Corrections press release citing FY2025 average annual appropriated expenditure per incarcerated individual ($49,290).
- MDOC Prisoner Costs report to the Legislature (cost-per-prisoner methodology).
- Court of Appeals 2024 Annual Report (2024 filings and dispositions).
- Budget line item reference for Michigan Court of Appeals appropriation figure used for illustrative per-filing cost proxy.
- SADO 2024 Annual Report (MAACS roster attorney hourly rates and reimbursement structure).
- The Sentencing Project, Parents in Prison (children impacted estimates).
- Pew Research Center (1-in-28 children and incarcerated parent estimate).
- Lee et al., 2013, associations between parental incarceration and multiple mental and physical health problems.
- Shlafer et al., 2017, parental incarceration associated with poorer school-based outcomes.
- Turney and Haskins, 2014, paternal incarceration and grade retention.
- Gifford et al., 2019, parental incarceration and later psychiatric and functional outcomes.
- Prior Clutch Justice reporting summary of Arizola example and broader sentencing concerns.
