YPSILANTI, Mich. (May 12, 2026) — A new report documents the many unique challenges faced by women serving life or long-term sentences in Michigan prisons. The report, titled Women’s Clemency Initiative: A Report on Liberating Long-Serving Women documents the prevalence of trauma and abuse prior to incarceration, the inadequate or inappropriate care women experience in prison, and the failure of age-based sentencing reform to account for women’s experiences. Authored by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) Michigan Criminal Justice Program, the report calls on Governor Gretchen Whitmer to implement a broad clemency initiative focused on women serving life and long sentences in Michigan prisons.
The report argues that Michigan’s reliance on extreme punishment has disproportionately harmed women and urges the state to realign its power toward healing, accountability, rehabilitation, and release. While the report focuses on women incarcerated in Michigan, these same trends can be observed in many states across the U.S.
“By prioritizing women who have served decades—many of whom are survivors of profound violence and have transformed themselves despite harmful conditions—the Governor can take meaningful, systemic action to repair harm, reunite families, and strengthen communities,” the report concludes.
The report is based on research conducted through years of direct advocacy with people serving life sentences in Michigan’s prisons, including co-writing countless commutation requests. In addition, AFSC’s research includes utilization of a dynamic dataset that drills down multiple variables including gender, crime type, sentence length, and more. This database was created in collaboration with graduate researchers from University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy.
The report documents how women serving long sentences are often survivors of childhood abuse, domestic violence, sexual violence, trafficking, poverty, and coercion. It further outlines how these realities are routinely ignored throughout criminal legal processes, including charging, trials, plea negotiations, sentencing, incarceration, parole, and commutation processes.
Among the report’s findings:
- Women 45 and older who have served decades in prison face accelerated aging, chronic illness, untreated menopause-related health concerns, and ongoing trauma inside prison environments.
- Women are systematically excluded from recent age-based resentencing reforms because they are often criminalized later in life after years of survival-based trauma and abuse.
- More than 500 women in Michigan prisons are serving 15 years or more, many after surviving abuse, trafficking, domestic violence, and childhood trauma. Yet most have few realistic pathways home.
- Black women make up approximately 13.7% of Michigan’s population but account for 43.5% of women serving life and long sentences.
The report highlights Michigan’s opaque commutation process, arguing that current review practices often disregard trauma science, gendered pathways to incarceration, the violence against women inherent in punishment-based systems, and evidence of transformation.
The report recommends that Governor Whitmer establish a Women’s Clemency and Resentencing Initiative that includes:
- A presumption of review and release for women age 45 and older who have served 20 or more years
- Trauma-informed and survivor-informed review standards
- Expedited clemency timelines and greater transparency
- Community-based review structures involving clinicians, advocates, formerly incarcerated women, and reentry specialists, and
- Expanded release opportunities for elderly incarcerated people, including men over 60 who have served decades in prison.
The report concludes with a letter authored by women incarcerated at Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility proposing a three-phase plan that could reduce the prison population by approximately 800 women over several years while improving conditions, saving taxpayers’ money, expanding healing-centered programming, and supporting community reintegration.
“This initiative is how we begin to recognize their transformation, restore dignity, and bring these women home,” the report states. The report situates clemency not only as an act of mercy, but as a constitutional safeguard, a mechanism to correct injustices, and an avenue to review and create relief for long-serving women. It concludes that women in prison and the state as a whole will benefit from public safety strategy rooted in rehabilitation and transformation rather than perpetual punishment.
The full report can be found here.
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The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) promotes a world free of violence, inequality, and oppression. Guided by the Quaker belief in the divine light within each person, we nurture the seeds of change and the respect for human life to fundamentally transform our societies and institutions. We work with people and partners worldwide, of all faiths and backgrounds, to meet urgent community needs, challenge injustice, and build peace.