Why We Need Second Look Legislation in Michigan

On November 12, 2024, Adalia Kirby gave the following speech at a rally in front of the State Capitol in Lansing calling on Michigan legislators to support Second Look legislation. Backed by 29 partner organizations, Second Look would reduce mass incarceration by allowing for a review of people’s long sentences. Although the bill failed to advance, AFSC Michigan and our partners will continue to advocate for it in the new year.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining me here today to show your support for Second Look legislation. My name is Adalia Kirby, and I am AFSC’s Program Coordinator of Ending Life and Long Sentences.

I have come here to share the most vulnerable pieces of myself with you all today because I am aware that some folks are concerned about what the passage of Second Look would mean for victims and survivors of crime. So let me tell you what it could have meant for me 13 years ago.

On November 3, 2011, my mother was shot twice in the head by her boyfriend while sitting in her car with my baby brother on her lap. I was only eight years old, and our lives were forever traumatized.

While there is nothing that could undo the harm that was done to my family that day, nothing was even attempted to be done by the state of Michigan to try and help us rebuild meaningful lives in the days, weeks, months and even years following this tragedy.

Struggling for years following the crime

Only a month after being shot, my mother struggled to try and sell her car to get the money to buy my brother and me Christmas presents that year. We were lucky that my great grandmother opened her one-bedroom trailer in a senior living community to my mother, 22-month-old brother and me. This allowed us to live and sleep in her living room after my mother was discharged from the hospital – or else we would have been homeless during that time.

We eventually had to move back into the same trailer park that we were living in when my mother was shot because we couldn’t afford to let the PTSD stop us from moving out my great-grandmother’s cramped trailer, which was also far from my school. There was a long time when we had no car and no way to take the trash out to our trailer complex’s dumpster area, go grocery shopping, and just go about our normal lives in general.

My mother wasn’t and hasn’t been able to work due to her disability. It took about three years for Social Security disability income checks to finally start coming in to help us. One can only imagine the struggle my mom went through to apply for disability income on her own with a traumatic brain injury that left her partially blind and with memory and cognitive issues.

To put it simply: It was one of the hardest times of our lives. We were traumatized, unsupported, and broke. And struggle we did.

My mother was a 35-year-old single parent with two young children who became permanently disabled with a traumatic brain injury after being shot. Today, you’ve heard only a fraction of the hardship that I was raised with as a result of that reality.

And here’s another harsh reality: Our state has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to incarcerate the man who shot my mother over the years since it happened. In fact, Michigan spends over two billion dollars each year to incarcerate over 30,000 citizens in state prisons.

From punishment to healing

So now, here’s a possibility for all of us to consider. With the $200 million in estimated savings from passing Second Look legislation, we could take actual accountability as a community to care for victims and survivors after they have been impacted by crime.

Second Look legislation would allow us to think big about justice reinvestment. It would allow us to take action for the victims and survivors who we claim to care so deeply about. We could invest funds to create a system for victims to be assigned a caseworker who closely follows them up to four years following the offense. This would ensure that the victim and their family receive the services and resources needed to live safe and happy lives once again.

We could create grants to pay for long-term rehabilitative therapy and counseling services that service the victim from the comfort of their homes rather than placing the burdens of cost, energy, and travel to receive such services on the victims and their families.

We could invest in grants to give victims of violent crime the funds to buy a house in a safe neighborhood or a nice car so they aren’t subject to homelessness or constant dependence on others to make it to appointments or errands.

We could create grants to pay for caregivers who would assist disabled victims who have minor children with childcare duties and maintaining domestic duties in their homes rather than leaving disabled parents to fend for themselves and their children alone.

For the sake of time, I won’t even get into how fast I had to grow up due to having a disabled mother. Know that a lot of my educational and social developments were abnormal due to the gaps in support throughout my childhood.

My mother should not have had to bear the weight of moving on from surviving a violent crime on her own. But the truth is, we as individuals are currently lacking tools which our state could provide us to rebuild ourselves and each other as a community after being harmed by violence.

It is one thing for us to claim as a society that we care about vulnerable people within our community. It’s an entirely different thing to actually do so.

From “tough on crime” to support and recovery

Today, I call upon all legislators in Michigan to stop hiding behind “tough on crime” rhetoric that creates an illusion of care for their constituents.

Second Look legislation would allow us to divert some of the money our state currently spends on incarcerating people for decades toward social programming instead. We could create avenues towards support, healing and recovery for victims which did not exist for me and my family 13 years ago.

I call upon our legislators to take accountability for the rebuilding of crime-impacted communities by passing Second Look legislation in Michigan. The possibilities for justice reinvestment through Second Look would create needed opportunities for healing among victims and survivors. It would help to break cycles of violence in our community. That is a reality we should all embrace and welcome, rather than fear and reject.