Citizens For Prison Reform Expands Advocacy Efforts, Calls For Transparency To Jails

(Source: MIRS.news, Published 03/31/2025) Following March 2024, the Michigan-based Citizens for Prison Reform (MICPR) was contacted by a retired couple from Oakland County. Their son had committed suicide in the local jail, but they described struggling to obtain the documents on his death.

Lois Pullano, MICPR's executive director, explained to MIRS he died on March 1, 2024. She claimed the couple continued to struggle to understand everything that occurred ahead of his death.

"Yes, he took his life. They also learned that he was crying out for help for days," Pullano said. "(This was) through other individuals in the unit that have written to them, and that they were actually able to speak with … some of whom they are still in contact with, trying to bring closure."

Pullano's organization became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2012, aiming to serve as a family-run prison advocacy group. Although it has often been focused on inmates under the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC), Pullano explained the MICPR has been working to expand its advocacy to county-run jails.

When asked which has offered greater transparency, a state-run prison or a county jail, Pullano said, "Right now, I am going to say the prisons.

"Each county operates very independently, and at this point, we have now really come to know that there's no mandatory death reporting from the jail, that a sheriff can choose to do their own investigation, or they can choose to bring in the state police or another third party," Pullano said.

She added that the MDOC does yearly audits of jails, but those are not public.

He explained there are 81 jails in Michigan, and in Genesee County, less than 12 of the 574 people in jail beds have been sentenced.

"The rest are awaiting trial. In that scenario, nine out of 10 people in jails in Michigan go back to the streets, whether it's time served (on) probation, tether … only 10 percent go to prison," Swanson said. "While they're here, we're giving them a chance to never come back through education."

"This is something that really has opened our eyes to all of this since being at this conference with multiple other states," Pullano said, referencing the Deaths in Custody conference that took place at the University of Texas at Austin in November 2024.

The university has spotlighted how, nationally, there were more than 7,500 deaths in local jails over an 11-year period, with nearly 5,000 of those individuals still at pre-trial status.

For groups like the MICPR, they want to know what interventions the Oakland County Jail inmate received ahead of committing suicide, and what their experience in jail consisted of. Additionally, in January, Pullano was working with an Eaton County jail inmate she said had spent 10.5 months "in jail in solitary."

The inmate was accepted into a mental health court treatment program in Ingham County. Despite being able to do "quite well" in the community, Pullano said, he was advised by a public defender to plea "Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity," and spend 60 days being evaluated in the Center for Forensic Psychiatry in Saline.

As of Jan. 22, the Center for Forensic Psychiatry had a 563-person waiting list.

"I'm going to be honest, there are roadblocks on a weekly basis," Pullano said. "We're assisting families who contact us because their loved ones are sitting in county jails, and most often, those individuals have severe mental illness, and so it becomes very difficult to assist and advocate on behalf of these families."

She said often the necessary forms with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which would permit certain family members to receive care details, are not being provided to the jailed individual.

"The form has not been provided that you receive when you go to your doctor's office," Pullano said. "There's such a lack of training that we're not recognizing these individuals have an illness, a medical condition, and they need treatment."

According to the state's health department, 179 people were in jail as of March 14 waiting to go through a court-ordered forensic process. The process involves considering if they require admission into a state psychiatric hospital. In contrast, 73 were on bond.

At the start of 2024, there were 430 defendants – with multiple sitting in a county jail setting – waiting to go through the psychiatric evaluation process.

"I think that we need to be concerned about any place where people are held in detention, whether those are prisons, jails, juvenile facilities, immigration detention facilities … anywhere where people are in a closed environment and are vulnerable to the worst things that could possibly happen to them," said Michele DEITCH, the director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs in Texas.

Deitch said across the country, there is a lack of reliable data around deaths in custody.

"Who are these people? What are they dying of and what can be done to prevent this?" Deitch said. "There used to be a requirement that all of this information about deaths would be reported to the federal government, but that is no longer being enforced, and so there's just very incomplete data about that."

As for policy, Deitch said she would like to see every state have at least an independent oversight mechanism with no formal connection to the corrections agency. She would like for the data to be routinely collected, made publicly available and analyzed.

"This isn't about playing a game of gotcha and 'who did something wrong?' It's all about how (we can) improve our systems. What can we do to make it better? How can we prevent deaths in the future? How can we ensure that legislators are getting out of their system the value they're spending on it?" Deitch said.

The MICPR is calling for heightened transparency, reporting mandates and family advocacy in county jails. But at the same time, the Genesee County Jail will be recognized from April 6-9 at the University of Oxford as part of the World Literacy Summit 2025.

Genesee County Sheriff Christopher Swanson – a 2026 Democratic candidate for governor – will be presenting on the jail's Inmate Growth Naturally & Intentionally Through Education (IGNITE) program. Swanson talked about the program and his upcoming remarks on today's episode of the MIRS Monday podcast.