IONIA, Mich. — When asked if prison helped her, Kimberly Woodson answered honestly with “yes and no.” Then she paused and concluded with “no.”
“It’s nothing that the Michigan Department of Corrections did for me that helped me with my time,” Woodson said during a Zoom interview with FOX 17 on Thursday. “It was the residents, the older ladies, the lifers, that took me up under their wing.”
They mentored Woodson and molded her into the person she is today.
Woodson was sentenced to life in prison when she was 18 years old, after a love triangle, involving her child’s father, ended with a bomb going through a woman’s home. A 92-year-old woman died that day, years ago.
“I had a life sentence and the Supreme Court decided it was unconstitutional for us to have a life sentence,” Woodson recalled. “Because I had never been in trouble before and I wasn’t actually at the scene of a crime, and my prison record, I was able to get resentenced to time served and I came home in 2017.”
She’s since became a prison reform advocate, supporting the Good Time Ballot initiative to transform the justice system, and volunteering with Michigan United, an organization dedicated to the same causes. She also created Redeeming Kimberly, a nonprofit that helps returning citizens get acclimated to life after prison.
However, when she heard that prisons in Ionia and Adrian were closing, she applauded.
“Any prison closing is an absolutely wonderful thing to do,” she said.
The Michigan Department of Corrections said in a news release this week that they’re closing part of the Gus Harrison Correctional Facility in Adrian and the Michigan Reformatory in Ionia in November due to a declining prison population.
READ MORE: Ionia prison to close amid declining inmate numbers
“There’s a lot of factors that go into making a decision like this,” said MDOC spokesman Chris Gautz. “One is certainly is the number of beds that we have, that our prison population has been decreasing for quite some time. We have a large number of open beds. We have 33 housing units that are closed around the state.”
According to the release, the prison population currently stands at 32,000 people, which is the lowest it’s been in more than 30 years.
Gautz added that there’s been a large number of job openings among the staff, which has led to burnout.
“Our staff especially in Ionia and in Adrian, as well as other places around the state, but in these two cities the staff their were working a tremendous amount of mandated overtime because there were so many vacancies,” Gautz said during a Zoom interview. “In Ionia in particular each prison had a 25 percent vacancy rate for their correction officers. So, you’re already starting your shift with a quarter of your workforce not existing.”
Gautz added the another reason they’re closing the facilities was due to a low recidivism rate. The rate has dropped from 45 percent to 23 percent over the last 20 years.
“That was the other good news in all of this. I always say, I wish, like if I didn’t have a job that would be great because that means that all the innocent people in Michigan would be at home with their families,” said Tracey Brame, the associate dean of experiential learning at Western Michigan University’s Cooley Law School. “Similarly, having to close a prison because you don’t have enough people to house is a good problem to have.”
Brame is also the director of the Innocence Project which is a part of the Innocence Network, an organization that works to release men and women from prison through the use of DNA testing.
She said part of the reason the recidivism is so low is because of educational programs being offered in and out of prisons.
“Parolees just are not committing crimes in the same numbers as they were years ago. I think we’re at an all-time low here in the state with respect to recidivism,” Brame said during a Zoom interview. “Just in the course of my career, I’ve seen a consistent uptick in programming for returning citizens, re-entry programming for employers, you know, willing to hire people returning from prison to the expansion of our expungements statutes to help people to clear their criminal records to make it easier for them to find jobs.”
Woodson agreed and added that, like her, a lot of people who were sentenced as juvenile lifers in the 1980s are being resentenced and are now returning home.
The MDOC said that those who were incarcerated in Ionia and Adrian will be transferred to other facilities throughout the state.
Woodson said she’s concerned that they’ll be put into cells with already two or three people in them, which could be dangerous considering COVID and monkey pox continue to circulate.
However, she said the ultimate goal should be to change the overall prison system to truly transform people.
“I don’t believe that incarceration should be the first option. I believe that broken people, they should be healed in other ways,” Woodson said. “We should find alternative ways and if we do have to send them to an incarcerated state, that it should be as minimum as possible because it doesn’t take 10 years for somebody to [learn] a lesson or catch on. If we give somebody five years and from the onset of that five years extensive programming the whole 5 years, they can evolve into a better person.”
