Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed an executive order today (WED) to create a juvenile justice task force. Whitmer says the task force’s job is to find ways that focus less on punishing juvenile offenders and more on rehabilitation. W
hitmer noted Michigan has one of the nation’s highest rates of detaining minors for non-violent offenses. That’s according to a ProPublica investigation.
“A single mistake early on in life should not negatively impact the rest of your life. For too many people in our state, it does right now.”
This builds on earlier changes that include raising the age for automatically charging a teenager for as an adult for non-violent crimes to 18 years old – stepping away from Michigan’s adult-time-for-adult-crime policies that were adopted in the 1990s.