MARQUETTE — Safe & Just Michigan has issued a report that it says shows that Michigan’s sentencing guidelines are “failing in their mission to end sentencing disparities.”

Safe & Just Michigan, based in Lansing, works to advance policies that would end what it considers the state’s overuse of incarceration and to promote community safety and healing.

The group conducted a webinar recently that included input from Barbara Levine, founder of the Citizens Alliance on Prisons and Public Spending; Josh Hoe, policy analyst for Safe & Just Michigan; and John S. Cooper, executive director of Safe & Just Michigan.

Levine said one of the problems with the sentencing guidelines is that they range widely, even as high as 15 years — and when a judge has that much discretion, lack of control is a problem.

“The result is enormous disparity,” Levine said. “The guidelines are not addressing the problems of disparity that they were in part meant to address.”

Another problem, she noted, is that Michigan uses only aggravating factors.

“Judges can only score things in a way that makes things worse because there’s no credit given for mitigating factors,” Levine said. “Judges can ultimately choose to go downward, but it’s downward from a determined guideline range that does not include mitigating factors.”

The report includes these findings:

– Defendants with similar backgrounds and offenses received significantly different sentences depending on the county in which they are convicted.

– “Life-max” guidelines have acted to substantially lengthen sentences, which drains public resources without delivering public safety.

– The application of habitual offender enhancements varies significantly by county, ranging from 13% of eligible sentences in Wayne County to 91.7% of all eligible sentences in Muskegon and Saginaw counties.

– Michigan’s guidelines are designed to be harsher and less consistent than those of other states using guidelines grids — possibly because Michigan is the only state with legislative sentencing guidelines that lacks a sentencing commission.

“Bottom line is: You don’t have to understand every detail of the guidelines to support the notion that it’s time to reinstate a sentencing commission and to rethink, to take a good hard look, at how each of these variables is working, and how the structure of the guidelines is working,” Levine said. “This is a new time. People’s attitudes have changed. These guidelines were built in the tough-on-crime era of the ’90s and it is time to take a hard look at what we’re doing to people we sentence, and how much we’re paying for people we’re sentencing.”

Hoe addressed the matter of individuals languishing in prison.

“Now at the state level, our prison populations are increasingly made up of people with long and indeterminate sentences,” Hoe said. “This was certainly true in Michigan, and continues to be true here in Michigan today.”

Perception, he stressed, is a major issue.

“There’s also a deep belief that long sentences are just desserts,” Hoe said. “Many people believe that when someone does serious harm, they should do substantial time. This report is certainly not trying to suggest that those people are necessarily wrong, but I do think it’s important to note that what does seem to have changed is our perception of what substantial time means.”

For example, he said that in the 1970s, people believed a 10- or 20-year sentence was significant.

Hoe pointed out that over 40% of people currently incarcerated in Michigan’s prisons are serving a sentence over 10 years, whereas in 1993, only 21% of prisoners were serving that length of term.

Hoe, who was incarcerated himself, said, “If you ask almost any formerly incarcerated person who they’re most worried about in our prisons, it is almost never the people who are doing long sentences.