If you haven’t heard the news, Michigan is staring at a budget problem that leaders are publicly describing as roughly a $1 billion hole across upcoming cycles.
When budgets tighten, the reflex is predictable. Cut services, freeze hiring, delay repairs. In short, we put a bigger squeeze the people who already feel squeezed.
But there is a place Michigan can start that is both fiscally serious and morally overdue: stop spending taxpayer money on incarceration we do not need.
The Baseline: Michigan spends about $49,000 per year to incarcerate one person
The Michigan Department of Corrections reports an overall per diem cost of $134.77 per prisoner per day.
So let’s do the math, shall we?:
- $134.77 per day x 365 days = about $49,191 per year, per person. That is not a talking point. That is an operating cost.
- And Michigan’s prison population at the end of 2024 was 32,778 people.
Even small reductions in unnecessary incarceration produce real savings, quickly.
“Nonviolent” is not small in Michigan. It is the difference between token reform and real reform.
Michigan’s own offense categories show a large share of people incarcerated for non-assaultive and drug offenses. Safe and Just Michigan citing MDOC statistical reporting have repeatedly pointed out that if reforms exclude assaultive offenses entirely, they only reach about a quarter of the prison population, which tells you how much policy is shaped by who lawmakers are willing to help, not who the evidence says can be safely handled differently.
Other public reporting on Michigan’s offense mix similarly indicates that the majority of the population is categorized as “assaultive,” with smaller but still meaningful shares for drug and other non-assaultive offenses.
The category labels are messy, and the politics around them are even messier. But the budget math is plain.
Estimate: what Michigan spends per year on nonviolent incarceration
Because Michigan’s public category breakdowns vary by year and framing, the cleanest way to estimate is with a transparent range.
Assumptions
- Prison population: 32,778 (end of 2024).
- Annual cost per prisoner: $49,191 (based on MDOC per diem).
- “Nonviolent” share (range): 25% to 30% of the prison population (a conservative-to-moderate range consistent with Michigan discussions that distinguish assaultive from non-assaultive and drug categories).
Result
- 25% nonviolent (about 8,195 people): ~$403 million per year
- 30% nonviolent (about 9,833 people): ~$484 million per year
That is not the full MDOC budget. That is only the share tied to incarcerating people who, by category, are not in the “assaultive” bucket and are often the most policy-responsive population for community-based alternatives.
Estimate: what Michigan spends per year on oversentencing
“Oversentencing” is harder because it is not a single statutory category. It is a policy choice that shows up as people staying inside longer than public safety requires.
Since Michigan does not publish a single simple count of “oversentenced people,” any estimate has to be scenario-based. Here are two defensible scenarios that avoid pretending precision we do not have.
Scenario A: Oversentencing equals 10% to 15% of the prison population
This is a conservative policy estimate that assumes a portion of the population could be safely reduced through parole modernization, resentencing review for extreme terms, and limits on returning people to prison for technical violations.
- 10% (about 3,278 people): ~$161 million per year
- 15% (about 4,917 people): ~$242 million per year
Scenario B: Oversentencing inside the nonviolent group equals 20% to 35% of nonviolent incarceration
This scenario reflects a common reality: the system is most likely to overuse prison time for people who could be better served by treatment, supervision, or structured reentry.
Using the nonviolent range above:
- Low: 20% of the 25% nonviolent estimate equals about 1,639 people, or ~$81 million per year
- High: 35% of the 30% nonviolent estimate equals about 3,442 people, or ~$169 million per year
These are not final numbers. They are budget signal.
Michigan cannot claim a $1B hole on one page and then treat incarceration as a sacred expense on the next.
What “unnecessary incarceration” looks like in practice
This is not a single villain. It is a stack of ordinary decisions that add up:
- Prison time used where structured treatment and community supervision would be safer and cheaper.
- Technical violations treated like new crimes.
- People aging out of risk, but not out of their sentence.
- Long sentences that far exceed the marginal public safety benefit of additional years.
- Risk tools and parole practices that default to no because no is politically safer than yes.
None of this is abstract. It is line items.
You Cannot Claim Fiscal Conservatism While Draining Taxpayer Resources
There is a rhetorical move that shows up every budget cycle in Michigan. Lawmakers describe themselves as fiscally conservative while treating incarceration spending as untouchable.
Those two positions cannot coexist.
Fiscal conservatism, at its core, is supposed to mean disciplined use of public resources. It means asking whether an expenditure produces measurable public benefit proportional to its cost. It means refusing to fund inefficiency simply because it is familiar.
Unnecessary incarceration fails that test.
When the state spends roughly $49,000 per year to confine a single person, and continues doing so long after public safety returns diminish, that is not conservative. It is wasteful. When people are held for technical violations, outdated sentence structures, or nonviolent conduct that could be addressed through supervision or treatment, taxpayers are funding containment for containment’s sake.
That is not restraint. It is inertia.
A government cannot credibly warn taxpayers about a billion-dollar budget gap while simultaneously pouring hundreds of millions into incarceration practices that evidence shows do not reduce harm, improve safety, or strengthen communities. Calling that “tough on crime” does not change the math. Calling it “conservative” does not make it responsible.
True fiscal discipline requires distinguishing between spending that protects the public and spending that merely preserves a system because changing it feels politically risky.
If lawmakers want to be taken seriously when they talk about budgets, they have to start being honest about where the money is actually going, and whether it is buying anything of value in return.
What Michigan could do that is both budget-smart and accountability-forward
If Michigan wants a serious savings strategy that does not punish the public, it can start here:
- Cap returns to prison for technical violations and expand intermediate sanctions.
- Expand parole eligibility review and reduce denial inertia, especially for people who have aged into low risk.
- Create a resentencing review pathway for extreme terms where continued incarceration has little public safety return.
- Use savings for what actually prevents harm: mental health care, housing stability, treatment access, and community-based violence interruption.
- Measure success honestly: fewer prison years, fewer returns, fewer people cycling.
When budgets tighten, it becomes fashionable to talk about “hard choices.”
This is a hard choice only if we keep treating incarceration as the default cost of doing business.
Fit-Bench: A Practical Tool for Fiscal Accountability
One reason unnecessary incarceration persists is that Michigan lacks a systematic way to identify where judicial and sentencing practices are quietly inflating costs without improving safety.
This is where Fit-Bench matters.
Fit-Bench is an early-warning framework designed to evaluate judicial and system performance through measurable capacity indicators rather than outcomes alone. Instead of asking only whether a sentence was legal, it asks whether the decision-making process itself shows signs of strain, inaccuracy, or overreliance on incarceration.
Applied at scale, Fit-Bench can help flag:
- Patterns of oversentencing that extend confinement beyond public safety value
- Inconsistent use of discretion that drives unequal outcomes and unnecessary prison time
- High rates of technical violations and returns to prison that signal supervision failure rather than criminal risk
- Judicial bottlenecks and decision fatigue that correlate with longer, costlier sentences
None of this requires rewriting the criminal code. It requires measurement.
From a budget perspective, Fit-Bench functions as a cost-containment tool. By identifying where incarceration is being used reflexively rather than judiciously, it creates an evidence-based pathway to reduce prison years without compromising safety.
From a governance perspective, it provides something Michigan currently lacks: a way to connect individual courtroom decisions to statewide fiscal impact.
A system that cannot see how small, repeated sentencing choices add up to hundreds of millions in annual spending cannot claim to be managing taxpayer dollars responsibly.
Fit-Bench does not replace judicial independence. It complements it by making patterns visible before they become budget crises.
Why This Matters
Michigan’s budget gap is not just a spreadsheet problem. It is a values audit.
A state that can identify a billion-dollar hole can also identify which expenses are inflated by habit, politics, and fear. Every unnecessary prison year is a choice to spend public money on containment instead of repair.
And when taxpayers are told to accept cuts everywhere else, it is reasonable to ask why the one system that reliably produces predictable harm keeps getting a blank check.
Sources
- Bridge Michigan reporting on Michigan’s projected roughly $1B budget hole.
- MDOC Prison Population Projection Report and MDOC press release reporting the end-of-2024 prison population (32,778).
- MDOC “Prisoner Costs” report showing overall per diem cost ($134.77).
- Michigan offense-category context and reform-reach discussion (assaultive versus non-assaultive and drug categories).
